There are dads who promise to take you to Disney and others who actually get you a kingdom 😂.
When Emily was 7, she asked her father, Jeremiah Heaton, a fairly innocent question: she wanted to know if she could ever become a real princess. He assured her that she could and, instead of leaving it as a childhood fantasy, began researching how he could keep his promise.
That was how he discovered Bir Tawil, a desert area between Egypt and Sudan that, due to a particular border dispute, neither country claims as its own. Jeremiah traveled there, crossed the desert, and planted a flag designed by his family.
He then named the territory the “Kingdom of North Sudan” and officially declared, at least within the family, that Emily was “Princess Emily”.
The story went around the world, although his proclamation did not legally turn Bir Tawil into a new country or make Emily an internationally recognized princess. But for a girl who had only asked her father if she could ever be a princess, it was probably enough to know that he was willing to cross a desert to try to make her dream come true 😂.