Nineteen-year-old Dane Karina Kristensen ducked into the Koepeles’ garnet-red, three door Daytona at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport on a chilly morning in early February in 1996. In the past five days she had experienced her first ever flight from Denmark and flight exchange at Heathrow Airport. She didn’t have many expectations, aside from the idea that all Americans lived in “huge, huge houses.” All she knew for certain was that this would be an adventure.

Growing up in Herning, Denmark, Kristensen’s travels as a child were limited to a national scale. As a young scout, she was able to go on many trips around the country. Her first taste of independent traveling was with her sister when she was 12 when the pair took a train across Denmark to visit their aunt in Copenhagen and stayed for a week.

At age 16, Kristensen went on her first international trip, a grape-cutting job near Paris, France. But she yearned for more. Kristensen dreamed of sailing the straits in Vietnam, of backpacking through Spain and of seeing America for herself.

“I think there’s always been an adventurous part of me, that I wanted to go out and see the world,” Kristensen said. “I wanted to go out and meet people who thought differently and people who lived differently.”

Her parents could not afford to send her to the United States for high school, so she searched for her own way over, eventually finding “Au Pair in America”, a company that matches young women from nearly 60 countries with families across the U.S. to provide “cultural child care that is flexible and dependable.” With a passionate love for children, and nanny experience dating back to her early teens, Kristensen filled out an au pair application and waited for the results.

Not too long after, Kristensen was matched with Brian and Julie Koepele, a couple in Ann Arbor, Michigan who had two daughters: six-month-old Margeaux and two and a half-year-old Sierra.

Kristensen was surprised but not disappointed when she arrived at the family’s cozy home, petite compared to the visions of sprawling estates that she had previously associated with American lifestyles. For Kristensen, the small size of the house allowed for a vast variety of memories.

“I remember on usually a Friday, early evening, Sierra and Margeaux would be in the bath, [Brian] would be somewhere talking, [Julie] would be laughing and I would be standing there putting my makeup on. We were all in the tiny little one bathroom,” Kristensen said. “You know, that’s the sort of fun memories I have.”

Kristensen lived with the Koepeles for two years, looking after the toddlers, going on trips and by extension ultimately becoming part of the family. Both sets of grandparents and corresponding aunts, uncles and other relatives welcomed the Danish girl with open arms.

Kristensen returned for a third year of nannying a few years after her initial time as the Koepele’s au pair, not too long after the family’s third daughter Grace turned two. Unaffected by her absence, all three girls, as well as their entire family, welcomed their old au pair back into their lives, starting right back from where they had left off.

To this day the family remains in contact with Kristensen, skyping occasionally and keeping in touch over social media. Although all three daughters, as well as their parents, have grown significantly since Kristensen’s au pairing days, the time passed has only allowed her to feel closer to them and continue to connect on a deeper level.

“I would say that being an au pair has probably been one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever done. The fact that you come into someone else’s home and you see loads of different ways that you can live as a family, different ways that you can handle things, different ways to just live as different people,” Kristensen said, “I never had any doubt that I was welcome. And that also reflected on the way that I wanted to let people into my home. It has [had] a huge influence.”