Out collecting postcards. Be back soon. Can’t wait to tell you about it!

I found out Dolly Parton died today.

“Dolly said she wants to be laid to rest in a plush field of cotton because after a life of wearing heavy rhinestones, she thought she deserved some rest.”

All that weight, all that shine, and underneath it, a woman just asking to be put back in the roots that grew her. Her humor, ever-present, even through the news of her death.

It seems odd, doesn’t it, to attach so much meaning to a country singer. But growing up in East Tennessee, Dolly was the stuff of legend.

The first song I ever learned on guitar was Wildflowers. A silly little girl playing three chords terribly, singing about being wilder than the other “flowers” on the hillside, how they just wilted in the sun, but she … she got to run.

I remember the tears slowly slipping down my cheeks, in my room with the door closed, feeling like Dolly was speaking directly to me, passing on instructions.

I know. DRAMATIC. But we’ll let it slide; I was 13.

She wasn’t just mine, obviously. I don’t think you had to grow up in Tennessee to recognize how impactful she was. She wrote Jolene and I Will Always Love You in the same year. Then gave away her own song rather than sell it. She watched Whitney Houston turn it into one of the biggest ballads in history. She built a theme park in the town she grew up poor in and made sure the jobs stayed local. She mailed millions of children a free book a month for decades through her Imagination Library just because she remembered what it was like not to have one. An icon who single-handedly made it out and yet consistently poured back into where she was from.

She used to joke that dumb-blonde jokes never bothered her, because she knew she wasn’t dumb (and she wasn’t even blonde).

From the outside, it seemed she was always a step ahead of anyone trying to reduce her, using humor to say the true thing before someone else could. She was exactly who she was underneath the wig and the rhinestones and the trademark laugh. And she knew where she came from.

I’ve spent most of my adult life stuck in the middle of that measurement. In love with where I’m from and always wanting to leave it. Pulled at on both ends. One hand holding my porch railing, the other already reaching for my boarding pass.

My world on this platform is attached to travel in some capacity. So I think it’s worth saying that travel is also, always, attached to where you came from.

You don’t leave a place so much as you keep leaving from it, over and over, carrying all the little pieces of it that live inside of you out the door.

Whether you like it or not.

Sometimes I don’t even realize what I carry. That is, until I say “y’all” or let a “yes ma’am” slip out accidentally. I get excited at something funny like smelling the rain when it hits hot pavement because it feels like an East Tennessee summer storm. My grandfather, who was from Newnan, Georgia, wore a bolo tie because he wanted, once, to be a cowboy. He never did become one. But my Dad gave me the bolo and I carry it around the world to remind myself, when I’m somewhere new, chasing something I’m not sure I’ll ever fully become, that wanting can be its own inheritance too.

Out of all her incredible accomplishments, it feels like Dolly’s greatest legacy was kindness. And a dedication and commitment to feed the place that grew her. She left, and left and then left again and somehow never once let go of her porch railing.

Maybe leaving and loving where you’re from aren’t opposites. Maybe you’re allowed to hold the railing and reach for the boarding pass with the same hand.

It’s my porch too. I’ll squeeze it a little tighter next time I’m home.

The sweet dregs of summer have set in.

I wish I had a word for this time of year, the brief inhale between late summer and autumn. It’s not quite summer, it’s not quite fall. It’s just the sticky, dusty, overripe end of it, and it is my most favorite season of all.

We’ve been living out of a truck for the last month, roaming through Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. And while the expanse of land in front of me seems to stretch forever, it has also, somehow, made me acutely aware of how little time I have left to be here.

Oh, how quickly a month can become a collection of tiny things I already miss.

So, I suppose this is my guide to savoring the dregs of summer in all their illustrious glory. To holding my breath and squeezing the juice out of all of the bits left at the bottom of the cup.

1. Wear the cowboy hat, even when you think it’s low-key embarrassing, because it is. You aren’t a cowboy, but you do own approximately one million cowboy hats. So force Shaggy to carry the box around for one month in the truck and pull it out on occasion. Briefly, you can become the person you are pretending to be. Commitment to the bit is key, as is the cowboy hat.

2. Turn the truck into a mess. Originally, it will stay organized, but after filling it with so much gear you’re so excited to use, keeping it tidy feels like a waste of time. The days are long and full of activities, and that is exactly the way it should be.

3. Buy the Bartender in a small town in Idaho a beer. Or maybe he buys you one. I can’t remember. But you’ll get a taste of the local tea (see what I did there?) and get invited to use his drift boat, as long as Shaggy mans the bar while you’re gone. He’ll shout, “I love y’all, have a good night,” as you walk out the door. You’ll feel basically local in a place you aren’t even remotely local.

4. House a rack of ribs at the local barbecue joint before an accidental opera invitation. Afterward, someone will hand you a cocktail you didn’t order and you’ll end up talking to half of Big Sky’s social register like you belong there. Plot twist: you definitely don’t.

5. Roll down the windows. The massive stretches of land filled with plains and mountains and expanse that stretch beyond what your mind can comprehend make you feel big and small all at the same time. When you roll down your window at hour 4 of a 6-hour drive, you’ll see a herd of bison on the side of the road, and you’ll throw your cowboy hat on and feel like you’re a part of it.

6. Chat with the guy about the dirt bike for an hour in the parking lot. He’s going to tell you he lived in Singapore and Hong Kong and Australia before settling in Tetonia, Idaho, and there’s nowhere he’d rather be.

7. Teach Shaggy to fly fish. It may only last this summer, but running around chasing rivers and stopping at any road pullout you see to check the levels is a fun memory. You might have to release the fish for him, but that’s the most entertaining part.

8. Go to The Rustic Pine when the Friday night rodeo is over. Make sure you watch the locals swing dance circles around the floor and around you.

9. Take your bike, and dive into the trails, especially that long one called Mountain to Meadows. You’re going to scream Whitney Houston’s Dance With Somebody the entire way down because you’re completely terrified of coming face to face with a grizzly, and maybe this will somehow help you avoid the problem. But ripping through the aspen from the top of the mountain to the valley is worth it.

10. Do absolutely nothing for a little while. You’ve spent the summer wringing every last drop out of it, but sometimes the best way to savor something is to stop moving. Sit on the tailgate with a beer. Let dinner on the Blackstone by the river take too long. Watch the sun disappear behind the mountains. Six months from now, you’ll probably remember this hour better than almost anything else.

I’m going to go sit outside a little longer and look at the sky above me, whose stars feel like they’re pressed against my chest.

I have decided the dregs aren’t the bottom of the barrel. They’re the sweetest part.

Inhale. Hold your breath a moment longer. And drink up.

My elopement anniversary is in 4 days. I know. Ew, love.

Deep in the depths of my phone is an album titled Happy Stuff. It holds a collection of photos, most of them blurry, oddly enough, a living record of my best memories. The image above is one of my favorite photos of all time. I haven’t printed it. Do people still do things like that? It’s not framed either. But every now and then I like to look at it because it brings me immense joy, as do most of the photos in that album.

I imagine the standard photographer wouldn’t think twice about it. They might even ask why I like it. The Tetons are in perfect focus, but our post-ceremony, mid-toast in the foreground is a total blur. I love this photo because it represents my wedding in a nutshell.

I’ve never put that day into words, so without further ado…

We picked Wyoming because we’d spent the past few summers there. It feels like summer camp every time you go, a place where you’re allowed to feel like a perpetual kid.

We didn’t tell anyone. It’s not that it was a secret or we needed to do it in secret, but once you tell one person, you have to tell everyone, and once you tell everyone, you have to invite everyone, and neither of us had the bandwidth or mental capacity to deal with a guest list. So it was either all or none.

The perpetual people pleaser still dies a little each time I remember I pulled this off.

The morning of, we went to a bike park, because apparently even on the day you get married, you need to go enjoy doing one of the things you like most together. I found an old pair of cowboy boots in the back of a thrift store that I liked more than any dress I’d tried on, and he wore a Hawaiian shirt.

We still needed a wedding band for Shaggy, but didn’t want to pay Jackson prices. We searched for anything simple. We couldn’t even find a basic silicone band just to suffice for the day.

“I have an idea,” he whipped his head towards me. Hours before the ceremony.

So we pulled into Ace Hardware and walked to the aisle that held a plethora of rubber washers. As we were digging through, an employee came over to help. Shaggy looked at him with complete sincerity.

“Do you think I’m an inch or three-quarters of an inch?”

We’d met with the officiant, Becky, a few days earlier, and she’d mentioned we needed to have two actual witnesses attend the ceremony to make the marriage legal in the state of Wyoming.

“Bring your friends!” we told her. “We’re not picky!”

I would like to point out that her gal pals were the best. Two older women, oozing enthusiasm and raving over the two of us. One of them maybe cried more than I did. I can’t even recall her last name.

The five of us drove into the mountains. Shaggy and I followed in our own car behind them. Up a windy gravel road, until we reached a trailhead. Then I threw my Blundstones on, carrying my new-to-me cowboy boots, and we hiked into a place called The Wedding Tree with a beautiful view of the Tetons enveloped by a canopy of two trees wound together. I slipped my “wedding shoes” on, and we stood under those two trees and said we were in it together.

Before we got started, I pulled my Sony A7II camera out and handed it to one of the witnesses.

“Could you just take a few photos? We don’t need anything special,” I told her.

The tiny piece of important information I forgot to pass on to her was how to use auto-focus. So each picture from our wedding is slightly out of focus. The funniest part was right before they left, Becky handed us a split of prosecco with two glasses. We poured them, and her friend made us pause before we took a sip.

“We have to capture this moment,” she exclaimed.

So Shaggy and I held our glasses in a toast position for a good five minutes as she got the “perfect” shot. Then the three women left us, and we sat under The Wedding Tree and sipped our split together.

That night, we spent hours laughing, looking through our collection of blurry wedding photos.

I’m sure plenty of people would look at this day in horror. But I love it. It’s exactly as chaotic and weird and mostly-in-focus as my life is.

In life, make sure you create an album called Happy Stuff. Fill it full of photos that make no sense to anyone but you. They sure do bring an immense amount of joy.

Ps. Shaggy still carries the rubber washer in his toiletry bag, not for sentimental reasons, or maybe definitely for sentimental reasons. I’ve never actually asked. Either way, it’s been through more airports than most of our actual belongings.

There is one thing I always keep on hand: a tube of glitter.

It may seem random, but if used correctly, I have found glitter to be an ideal icebreaker when traveling. It’s unexpected it adds a little flair to any situation and I have yet to see it provide anything other than a laugh, even right before an adventure deep into the Atlas Mountains with three male guides.

The Ali guesthouse, where we were sleeping deep in the Atlas range, woke up under snow. Leslie and I had a big mountain bike day on the agenda, and our guide Hassan had recruited two young locals he knew well to join us for an epic day. It was early, but Samir, Azdine and Hassan were already outside, passing around a plate of cookies while simultaneously making sure all of the bikes were dialed. Leslie and I stepped out onto the deck, glitter already across our cheeks. And I decided this was as good a moment as any.

I opened the tube and told each of them to hold still.

Azdine went first, tilting his chin up, ready to accept his fate. He laughed so hard glitter ended up on his nose. The hoots and hollers from the peanut gallery blew into the air and the mood was set. The simultaneous excitement and horror at the situation felt palpable amongst the three of them.

“Never in my life did I think I would do this,” Hassan, our oldest guide, said in his calm, quiet demeanor as he stepped up to the plate. Then, committing to the bit, he said gently, “But I’m doing it.” His slight smirk came through as I brushed the final cheek with sparkles.

Samir put up the biggest fight, but eventually gave in.

“Just don’t tell anyone in the village about this.” He gave a cheeky nod to Azdine, who already had his camera out, ready to document.

Oh, the oos and ahhs and selfies that came after.

Look at this! So silly!

You look insane!

Will we ride faster?

HA, the village can never know.

Three grown men, brought on specifically to keep us alive on a mountain, now faintly sparkling under a Moroccan sky. I felt like I’d picked up a little more intel on each of them as I watched them interact with this absurd foreign item together.

Then, like all good mountain bike rides start, we dove into the mountains, newly adorned in glitter. The plan, in short, should have been easy: a short uphill climb on a gravel road, then a coast downhill to a massive descent into the village of Amizmiz.

What was not accounted for, because who even knew it snowed in Morocco in April, was how the weather would affect the trail.

“Don’t worry. Just 7 kilometers to go,” Samir offered as if that was supposed to keep us motivated. His energy was so effervescent you couldn’t help but enjoy what was happening in that moment, even if it was an involuntary mud bath. We were kilometers in on a descent in which we were walking our bikes. The thick clay had lodged itself into our tires, so we had to throw them on our backs and walk. My tires became two circular paddles of clay, spinning uselessly, picking up more mud with every rotation until the wheels simply refused to turn at all.

“This is the most ridiculous ride I’ve ever been on in my life,” I said out loud with a chuckle. Incredulous, but also somehow still having a great time.

We became a caravan of clay, all of us, all equally useless, sliding and swearing our way up and down a mountain that had seemed so reasonable on a map the night before.

Azdine, a ball of energy, took off, his bike slung across his back, ran up the trail and disappeared into the fog. Minutes later he returned, helping Leslie with her bike. Hassan felt inclined to take off both of his wheels and return for them later, moving his bike to the next location piece by piece. Each of us was managing the situation with our own tactic. It was hours of endless hilarity.

By the time we found the guesthouse Samir had mentioned many muddy miles ago, we looked absolutely insane. Orange clay covered every inch of us and glitter was still smeared onto our skin. The tiny sparkles from the tube had made their way beyond our cheekbones and sat on our noses, our clothing and a flake was even to be found on a bike or two.

In what felt like the middle of nowhere, a man came out to greet us, followed by a woman, wiping her hands on her apron. They took one long look at the five of us standing in her doorway, dripping in mud.

The woman’s face screamed what planet did you come from, but she shooed us towards a different area of the bergerie, towards a water source. Chasing us to the wash area as the five of us carried our bikes over to it and began the process of cleaning our vessels. Mud and water blasted us from the pressure of the hose, as the sky opened up and it began to hail.

“You just never know what can happen on bikes,” Samir looked at us with a giant smile. And what could we do by join in on the live and let live attitude.

The woman continued to watch, helping where she could, giggling uncontrollably at times, a grin situated on her face the entirety of our bike washing mission. Then she said something in Arabic to the group and the three Moroccan guides belly laughed.

“What did she say?” I asked.

“She said we are an absolute catastrophe,” Samir replied, still laughing. Glitter shimmering across his cheekbones.

I told you. Best icebreaker of all time.

Days like this one are why I keep adventuring on my mountain bike. For the trails, of course, but really for the people you end up glittered and muddy with. I dug deeper into the wider mountain bike scene in Morocco for the latest Freehub Issue 17.3 — Blended Layers in case you’re interested!

This story starts as all others do.

By convincing your friend to go to Oktoberfest.

We all have that magical friend in our lives, don’t we? The one who is you, but in a different font. You understand the deep inner workings of each other because on some minor level you’re the same. However, maybe you’re okay with a twenty-person room in a hostel, and she, well…has common sense.

We were 27 at the time. I told Bridget I wanted to experience Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany, and I was going to go alone if I had to. I had three friends from North Germany who were planning to join.

“I’ll go with you,” she said over tacos one night. “I’ve never been to Europe.”

This is the part where I should tell you that Bridget does not, historically, say yes to things like this. Bridget is the most thoughtful, caring person who likes to know how a thing ends before she agrees to be in it (understandably). And here she was, taco in hand, agreeing to a beer festival in a country she’d never set foot in, with a friend whose usual itinerary was “we’ll figure it out.”

So, we booked our tickets and bought our dirndls.

We should have interpreted the situation at hand the second we landed. My North German friends, the ones I’d been counting on to translate and to generally make us look like we knew what we were doing, took one step into Bavaria and said they couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying.

“This,” they said about Bavarian German, “Is its own language.”

So there we all were, fluent in nothing but fumbling through Munich surrounded by a sea of dirndls and steins. Our festive wear did look pretty good, though.

At Oktoberfest, I learned it was best if you just fully commit to the chaos. And there was a lot of chaos to commit to: six hundred thousand people, tents the size of airport hangars oompah bands competing with each other from three different directions. You just hope that the day will sort itself out.

With limited time to tackle this festival, we went tent to tent, stein to stein, until the crowds blurred into one long, happy smear of Bavaria. So when, somewhere between a cookie stand and a Ferris wheel, Bridget said she had to find a bathroom, none of us thought twice about it.

“Don’t wait for me. I’ll find you,” she said.

*Word to the wise: This is not standard protocol, but once you’ve had a stein or two, your brain power is not firing on all cylinders.

We didn’t wait. It was an extremely dumb thing to agree to, because her phone had no battery left, and we were about to become four very hard people to find in a field of six hundred thousand strangers.

In the ten minutes she was gone, we made friends. At Oktoberfest, everyone is your friend by the second liter. We got swept up with a group who somehow had access to a VIP tent. From what my German friends could gather, they were sausage heirs, which made complete sense to me at the time, because as I mentioned earlier, we had committed to the chaos. We went in, and I texted Bridget where we were.

Just come in, I typed, as if that was a reasonable instruction to give my friend alone at a festival with an almost dead phone and no real concept of the layout.

One of my favorite things about Bridget is she obeys the rules. We equally don’t like to get in trouble. This is an important detail because you need to understand what it meant that she looked at the man guarding the VIP tent entrance who had already told her she couldn’t enter, waited for the half-second his head turned, and darted past him.

Oh, the boundaries we break when we travel.

Inside, I couldn’t get to her through the crowd, and I couldn’t figure out how to tell her where I was. So, I found a ladybug balloon floating above the chaos. I located the woman carrying it, and followed her.

I’m by the ladybug, I typed. Normal sentences when you’re in a foreign country.

Five minutes later, I saw Bridget sprinting toward me, eyes watery (duh), and she came at me in a full hug that had me nearly lose my footing.

“Let’s go find you a drink,” I said.

So, dear reader, this is an ode to all of our friends in different fonts. The ones who will ride the wave of a German beer festival with us and come out on the other side unscathed. Even though by all probabilities, they should be very much scathed.

Usually because of you.

Find them, keep them and make sure they don’t go to the bathroom alone.

Three days later, I convinced her to accidentally hike eleven miles to the top of a glacier in casual wear by promising a beer at the end. But that’s a story for another day.

Hi Bridget. You’re the best.

Out collecting postcards. Be back soon. Can’t wait to tell you about it!

“Aunt Caroline…”

“Yeah, Feefs?”

“You’re really weird.”

A small, factual verdict, delivered plainly, like she’s reporting data, and then immediately abandoned for the tube of glitter I just handed her.

My niece is right, obviously. Kids usually are. They see the world exactly as it is, with no pretense or reason to question what is being presented to them yet.

We just got to the gate after rolling through the airport en route to celebrate my Dad’s retirement. I’ve got her strategically placed on my rolling carry-on, straddling it like a horse as we navigate our way through oncoming traffic.

Sometimes I feel like a caricature in my own life. I let people talk about it like it was the leftover option, the thing I ended up with because the traditional path didn’t take hold. Like I was just bumbling around and thought, oh, this will do. Like every single move I’ve ever made wasn’t absolutely intentional. “Oh, Carolineeee,” said with a slight tilt of the head, a hint of pity baked in, like I’d wandered off the map, fell to the floor and sank into the abyss, instead of actively deciding that I’d draw my own.

Being “weird” isn’t really about you. It’s just a cheap, lazy way of naming the gap between the life someone thinks is normal and the life that’s different. My favorite version of this in real time is: Must be nice.

So I’m here to make a case for The Fun Aunt. I am putting a name to the actual function I serve in this family, and it isn’t helping change diapers (because I am, in fact, extremely bad at that).

Reasons the Fun Aunt is Needed:

• Because when she calls me lost in the middle of Venice, who else is going to tell her the advice an Italian couple gave me in the same situation - “What a beautiful day. You’ve got plenty of time to be lost.”

• Because when she wants to move to New York City to try it out and only has $500 in her bank account, someone needs to tell her all she has to do is try. And probably spare a few extra funds.

• Because if she’s afraid to take her clothes off and experience a Hammam, someone needs to tell her that it’s just bodies and we’ve all got one. Go ahead and get your skin scrubbed down.

• Because if her Australian friends ask her to go to a bush doof at the base of a Japanese volcano, she’s going to need someone to tell her, “I don’t see why you wouldn’t.”

• Because if she decides she wants to turn her life around at any point and at any age, she’ll need someone to tell her that it will most likely work out.

• Because who else is going to send the postcard from a miscellaneous pin on the globe?

There’s always a tiny, ever so quiet, guilty voice inside of me whispering, you made the wrong call. Not because I did (if anything, I feel the opposite), but because there's no one around to hand the feeling back to me and whisper otherwise.

You know, that whole “society” thing.

So, here’s my actual case: Every family needs the weirdo. Someone who can come back from wherever, whenever, with red dirt still in her shoes and ocean salt lingering in her hair and say, here is a version of a life you didn’t know was on the menu. Not so you can convince anyone else to order it, just so they know it’s there in case they want it. My personal body of evidence, collected over enough years, that says, hey, this is allowed too. Bonus: It’s a lot of fun.

So, Feefs, when you’re older, and someone says your Aunt is really weird, tell them you already know that. Tell them she decided she wanted to be someone who tried to keep a thread of audacity alive, just in case you also needed permission to do something weird.

And make sure to share that I always carry a tube of glitter with me. Just in case they want some too.

Fun Fact: It’s scientifically proven that chaos ensues when seven women travel. I’m still waiting for the journals to publish it, but I have done extensive research in this department. The perfect ratio of calamity and errors and also a real good time isn’t easily generated, but women gathering usually creates this perfect chemical balance.

It’s a beautiful thing right up until all ferries stop running and there’s a storm brewing, ready to descend on the exact island you were unaware you were stranded on in the first place.

We were supposed to have one more full day. Sun, wine, whatever else the Greek Gods were willing to provide us with. Instead, we made it to Aegina with two pieces of information delivered to us in rapid succession: there was a ferry strike, and there was a giant storm headed our way. Either one alone would have been an inconvenience, but together they formed significant evidence that all pointed to the same conclusion. We needed off the island a full day early, or we were going to miss our flight home.

Seven women. One flight. Zero ferries. Perfection.

It was the off-season, so a slower pace and a few mishaps were to be expected, but a complete pivot at the last minute of the last hour seemed impossible to navigate, especially with everyone else trying to evacuate before things were shut down for the next few days.

So we did what anyone would do in this situation: the seven of us fanned out across the docks and started asking increasingly frantic questions to increasingly unbothered locals. We did have one advantage going into this situation. The host of our accommodation had given us a simple instruction: Look for Jamaika. He can help you.

That was it. Not a boat company. Not an actual phone number to dial. Just, “Find Jamaika”. As if all we needed to do was click our heels together three times, say the right thing to the right stranger, and a boat would appear.

However.

We did what he said. Up and down the docks, a tag team of sorts, seven of us spread out, while also trailing behind whoever was leading at that moment, asking any person who looked remotely nautical the same question: do you know Jamaika? Met, mostly, with shrugs. Until finally, a man stopped, looked at my friend Leslie for a long second, and said,

“I know Jamaika. Do you know Jamaika?”

Which, honestly, is a very fair reaction. Seven American women showing up on the docks demanding a man by a single, potentially fictional name is a reasonable thing to be suspicious of.

“Does he have a boat?”

The man must have decided we were harmless, or at the very least entertaining, because he lifted his leathery, weather-worn finger, pointed down a row of docks and said, “He’s right over there.”

A few more rounds of caterwauling the name Jamaika, and then a man stuck his head out of the side window of a small water taxi that had black bold letters across the top edge: J A M A I K A.

“I’m Jamaika.”

As it turns out. Jamaika was cool, calm, collected and completely unbothered, his exuberant energy clearly able to handle worse problems than the onslaught of panicking tourists standing in front of him. He couldn’t take us all the way to Athens with the encroaching storm, but he could get us to a shorter crossing point, where, he assured us, a “driver” would be waiting to take it from there. No further details were offered. But we also didn’t ask. I think we would have agreed to almost anything with a boat attached to it at that point.

The sea, however, wanted to let us know it did not agree to us leaving.

The swells were enormous. Slapping the glass windows every few seconds as we slowly bobbed up, only to come crashing down. The small taxi was negotiating with the sea, as my team of seven were gripping whatever we could get our hands on, doing the math on our own mortality, exchanging the very unique wide-eyed silence of friends signaling to each other this could be the end. Bags were sliding to the front of the vessel; the safety elements were hitting the floor of the boat, creating a symphony of loud bangs and clatters. All the while, Jamaika was chattering away. He consistently turned around mid-swell to say something to us, cheerful as ever, completely unbothered by the fact that the ocean appeared to be in a fight with us. I have no idea what he was saying half the time. I just know that every time the boat dropped and my stomach went with it, I’d look up and he’d still be mid-sentence, two hands in the air, not even looking ahead, animated as he told us a tale from the island or a funny quip about his family.

We made it. Obviously we made it, or I wouldn’t be telling you about it from my couch instead of a Greek Coast Guard report. As promised, there was a driver waiting on the other side. We caught our flight. The storm arrived, presumably, right behind us, to an island that no longer had seven loud American women on it.

I think about Jamaika sometimes, and not because he makes a very good story, although, hellooo, this Greek comedy writes itself.

He’ll come to mind because for every ounce of dire, water-taxi-in-a-storm panic that travel produces, there is an equal and opposite, opposing force of things working out, typically because you handed yourself over to a stranger whose only qualification was that someone on a dock said his name. Which oddly gives you reason enough to trust him with your life for sixty-five minutes.

Somewhere in every impossible, logistical, diabolical, chaotical travel nightmare, you just have to find your Jamaika. Usually with a little grit and a LOT of trust.

I am sitting at the gate with a carry-on that weighs exactly as much as it shouldn’t. Headed home from two months spent in Lapland, where I forgot what the moon looks like. After our third summer here, this place feels oddly like a version of home.

Which means I am also, currently, the exact target demographic for both providing and receiving unsolicited travel “wisdom”.

There is a woman three seats down from me. I haven’t spoken to her, but she is nonetheless radiating the fresh energy of someone who had a life-changing trip abroad and is headed home to tell everyone about it. I can confirm this because I overheard her say it on the phone.

The age-old tale about travel advice is typically this: It’s always unprompted, it’s usually delivered with the smug certainty of someone chomping at the bit to proclaim it and it is almost always some variation of the same cliché sentence that has been said so many times the meaning doesn’t land anymore. Get lost on purpose. Travel like a local. It’s about the journey, not the destination. Said once, these might be true insights. Said for the four hundredth time, by a stranger at a gate, or a friend over a beer, or a poster you can find on the internet, and they are more aligned with a Live, Laugh, Love sign hanging above a fridge.

And YET, dear reader.

Yes, there’s a twist; I won’t pretend like there isn’t, but first, let’s suffer through a few of the most repeat-offending travel clichés together.

CLICHE NUMBER 1: Get Lost on Purpose

Habitat: Travelers standing in front of something photogenic, captioned in a font pretending to be profound.

Why It Makes Me Want to Scream Into the Void: Because “getting lost” sounds unbelievably whimsical until you are actually lost, with 4% battery, in a city where you do not speak the language, and the only place you recognize is the piazza you’ve been circling for four hours. Romanticizing being disoriented is a luxury reserved for people who have already eaten that day.

The Begrudging Truth That’s Actually Buried Inside It: In the back alley, past the music box museum, in an ocean-side town on the island of Hokkaido, is the most delicious sushi I’ll ever try. Found only because I was, in fact, lost. (It also holds surf clam, which I had to physically choke down due to texture and my gag reflex, but that’s a story for another day). I found it buzzed on sake because I couldn’t find the karaoke bar. After all, the map app had failed us twice already, and all other restaurants were at max capacity and understandably didn’t want English-speaking customers. After poking my head through the entryway curtain to say hello, the woman finally took us in.

CLICHE NUMBER 2: It’s About the Journey, Not the Destination

Habitat: Said specifically and exclusively by people who are not currently in the middle seat on a delayed red-eye, after three connections, listening to a stranger’s podcast through their leaking AirPods.

Why It Makes Me Want to Scream Into the Void: Because the journey, as a literal matter of fact, often involves forcing yourself to push through jet lag because otherwise you’ll have to sleep on top of your suitcase, while someone is singing a very off-key rendition of Alicia Keys’ New York in the background. The journey is rarely transcendent. The journey is mostly logistics with really bad fluorescent lighting.

The Begrudging Truth That’s Actually Buried Inside It: There is, however, the part of the journey when I’m on a train cresting over the hill, and the light is doing that low gold thing it only does right before it disappears. I see a mountain range in front of me that I may only see once in this lifetime, and then I catch my own reflection in the window looking, for a milli-second, like someone who is exactly where she’s supposed to be.

CLICHE NUMBER 3: Travel Like a Local, Not a Tourist

Habitat: Said by people who have never once been mistaken for a local anywhere, including their own hometown.

Why It Makes Me Want to Scream Into the Void: Because I am, definitionally, a tourist. Yes, I am a traveler, but sometimes I am just a tourist. I have a return flight. I don’t pay taxes here. I am not fooling anyone, least of all the 20-year-old at the hostel reception who has clocked my shoes, my accent and my flagrant overuse of a translation app within four seconds of my arrival. Pretending otherwise, for me, can be its own special kind of cringe.

The Begrudging Truth That’s Actually Buried Inside It: Except the mornings when I’ve gone to the same open-air breakfast shop three days running because it’s off-season and it’s the only place open to eat in the village. And the man, who is confused why I’m here in the first place, just brought me what I’d ordered the day before with the bottle of Lizano that I typically dump over my entire burrito. That tiny, unearned intimacy brings me so much joy. I am still a tourist, but for four mornings at least, I was a “regular”.

CLICHE NUMBER 4: You’ll Never Regret a Trip, Only the Ones You Didn’t Take

Habitat: Embroidered on a pillow somewhere. Captioned under an airport photo. Said by (insert extended relative here), unprompted, at Thanksgiving.

Why It Makes Me Want to Scream Into the Void: Because this is, statistically, untrue. I have regretted specific moments on trips with great clarity and detail. I regretted the one where I got food poisoning on day two and had no option but to ride a bus for 14 hours. Regret is a real and available emotion, even on a trip.

The Begrudging Truth That’s Actually Buried Inside It: I have never once regretted having gone. Not the way I regret the things I didn’t do, like telling my friend I couldn’t swing an extra flight to meet him in Spain where he somehow scored free tickets to a football game and danced the night away with the rest of the city in a celebration of the win. The “bad trips”, at the very least, always become a real good story.

CLICHE NUMBER 5: Travel Will Change You

Habitat: Said by the guy at the hostel breakfast buffet who's been 'finding himself' in Southeast Asia for fourteen months.

Why It Makes Me Want to Scream Into the Void: Because this is the emptiest one of all, a sentence so vague it can mean anything, which means it means nothing. Changed how? Into what? I have come home from trips exactly the same person, just very sunburnt and very behind on laundry. Not every flight is a metamorphosis. Sometimes a place is just a place, and you are just tired, and that’s okay too.

The Begrudging Truth That’s Actually Buried Inside It: I just spent two months in Lapland, the same two months I’ve now spent there three summers running, and somewhere in year three it stopped being a place I visit and started being a place that holds a very tiny sliver of me. A second home with its own moon and its own version of me who knows the bike park doesn’t open until ten, and sole poka mikhään is slang for “it ain’t no thing,” and the reindeer’s favorite spot to congregate is at the top of the fell.

The thing about clichés is they aren’t tired phrases because they’re false. They’re tired because someone, somewhere had the audacity to write down the truth, and now all we want to do is remind everyone that we know the truth too.

So yes. Pack light. Get lost on purpose. It’s about the journey (sometimes, occasionally, only when the light does that thing I love). Take the trip.

They just called boarding group 4, and the woman three seats down is still on the phone, mid-monologue about how this trip changed everything. I fire off a text to my sister, saying the exact same thing: this trip changed me.

Because, you know what, maybe it did.

Out collecting postcards. Be back soon. Can’t wait to tell you about it!

A disclaimer before we begin: There’s no moral lesson at the end of this essay. It’s getting filed away into the Sometimes, No Matter How Hard You Try, You’re an Idiot Tourist category. Those embarrassing (slightly shameful) moments need to be documented, too.

There is a particular flavor of traveler that I have come to recognize, mostly because I am her and she is me. I’m a loud person. And as much as I try to amend my boisterous ways when in other countries, my problem with volume control somehow always makes an appearance. My friends, well, they are also loud.

We were in a neighborhood that was tucked away in a corner of Kyoto. It was quiet. And I do mean QUIET. This type of quiet is excruciating to someone like me, who usually seeks to fill spaces void of words.

For someone who doesn’t like silence, I’m often in places whose cultures don’t mind it. It’s a running joke in my household at this point. We’ll be out with newfound friends, who are reveling in the natural break in conversation, while I make eye contact with my husband, chomping at the bit to breathe life back into the air.

There were five of us that day. The group itself is irrelevant, except to say that together, we are not a unit that trends toward restraint.

We had found a coffee shop that was described in reviews as “intimate.” A word I now understand to be code for five seats. You had to want the coffee to get there, down a side street, then another side street, hook a left at the temple that made us stop and take way too many pictures, then straight through the stretch of neighborhood so still and peaceful that I instinctively started talking louder.

We knocked on the door when we arrived. It just felt like that kind of place. A woman answered, her smile sweet and her demeanor gentle. She was in an all-cream, lace dress. They were brewing a pot, and she asked us to wait outside.

So we did. We situated ourselves directly across the narrow street from the shop. We continued our conversation, mapping out the rest of our day. Sweating uncontrollably from Japan’s August heat.

After a few minutes, the door to the shop opened, and the woman stepped out.

She was lovely when she looked at us, smiled, and softly said, “Kite? Kite?”

The five of us looked at each other. Confusion stirring.

She said it again. Kite. Kite. A full smile. Complete patience.

I smiled back at her and nodded. My diplomatic default: smile, nod, buy time, figure out what is trying to be communicated on the fly, trying not to embarrass anyone, mainly myself.

I give my four friends the wide-eyed stare, then pull my phone out, asking her to type into my Google Translate. Not realizing, of course, that it’s completely useless to her, as my phone does not contain Japanese characters.

She holds a finger up to signal just a minute to us.

“What is kite?” Erin whispered once she’d stepped back inside.

“A bird, maybe?” Mary Beth offered.

“Maybe it means welcome?”

“Maybe she’s complimenting us.”

“Is she talking about the coffee?”

She came back out seconds later, holding her phone delicately. The words were already typed into it on a translation app, ready to transfer the message that felt vital to us in that moment. With both hands, she extended the phone toward us, an offering.

All five leaned in.

The screen said: Quiet.

I estimate we stood there for about three full seconds (of silence if you can believe it) before it landed.

Then we all let out a gigantic guffaw before immediately covering our mouths to prevent further slippage from happening.

We apologized. Sumimasen, Sumimasen. Many times. More times than was probably helpful.

And realized we were once again at a volume not suitable for the area. So, we all shut up and gave her the double-handed thumbs up. Message received loud and clear. Yes, that pun was intentional.

She smiled, like we weren’t the most embarrassing people on the planet, and went back inside until the pot was brewed. Then she beckoned us in.

The coffee was, for the record, extraordinary.

And we drank it, in near-perfect silence.

My husband was not surprised when I told him the story.

Facilitated naughtiness. I hope that’s what they put on my tombstone.

She was a woman of poor decisions and excellent judgment, but most importantly, she facilitated naughtiness, and she knew exactly what she was doing.

Three months ago, I rolled into a campground in miscellaneous Utah at 9:30 pm with my friend Amanda, and a car full of sandy gear after we’d spent 4 days held in between two canyon walls. We slowly cruised through the roundabout, headlights low, scouring the grounds for an empty site.

We didn’t find one.

We pulled back into the main parking lot and cooked the ole classic Michelin-star camping meal of 1Chili-Mac. We shoved most of it down our throats before I accidentally dumped half of the noodles out of the makeshift pot that sat on the tailgate of the truck.

“We can’t really keep driving in the dark,” Amanda finally acknowledged out loud, spork in hand. “I think we’re going to have to poach it for the night ...”

We picked a spot near a group of picnic tables, right next to the parking lot. The walk-in campsites were close, but it looked like everyone was settling in for the night. We’d be up and out before 6 am, and no one would be the wiser. Specifically, the rangers.

We’d already waited out a Mom and Dad team who were wrangling their two kids and a collection of various toys for entertainment purposes, all strung out between their walk-in site and car. When they’d finally organized and locked their outdoor paraphernalia, we made our move. Making quick work of the two-person tent, we had it pieced together and our covert camp set up in no time. Then, with our headlamps on their highest setting, we saw the Dad walking towards us.

Neither of us said it, but I knew what we were both thinking: We’re screwed.

We explained the situation, knowing it could go one of two ways. He had that look about him: head to toe in worn-out Patagonia, a guy who had at some point lived loose and he talked in that deep, slow, trail slang way, like most of the grungy dudes from Colorado do.

“Right on. Gotta do what you gotta do sometimes,” he said as he made his way to grab one more toy from his car.

A stamp of approval.

It felt like we had somehow hilariously earned his respect, almost as if he was just excited to hear that the “dirtbag dream” was still alive and kicking, and that the “kids” were still poaching campsites if necessary.

We are 36.

Nobody writes the dirtbag chapter for 36-year-olds.

Most travel writing about ‘‘freedom” or “adventure” assumes youth. It's written for the person who doesn’t have anything yet. The gap year. The post-breakup solo trip. The summer you figure yourself out before real (whatever that means) life begins. Freedom, in that framing, has an expiration date. You get it young, and then once you've accumulated enough to lose, you trade it in.

But here's what I think is true: travel doesn't give you freedom. What travel actually does, if you let it, is scramble your signal. It dumps a pile of dirt onto your tidy, clean floor, and then you have to sift through the chaos. Not forever, just long enough to “poach” a campsite at 9:30 pm and feel genuinely giddy about it.

Now, lean in when I say this. There’s no age limit on that.

The facilitator of naughtiness hides in the depths of our being the entire time, waiting for the right conditions to make an appearance. I hope she always resurfaces.

It wasn’t until later, in the wee hours of the night, through whisper-cackles that were absorbed by our tent, that we both asked, “Do you think Rad Dad would still be impressed if he knew we were 36?”

Most likely his age. Cue more cackles.

And somewhere in between the laughter dying down and sleep finally pulling me under, I thought, who cares?

See, she knew exactly what she was doing.

It is 1 am. I am driving back to camp after my fourth hike of the day, and I am actively debating whether or not to take a polar dip in the ocean when I get there.

This is my third summer spent above the Arctic Circle. You’d think I would have learned something.

I should tell you, for context, that I am a 9:30 pm bedtime person. I have been a 9:30 pm bedtime person for years now. I moved past the night owl ways of my youth and forged ahead as an early-to-bed, early-to-rise human. Proud of it, even. But not in the “I’m better than you” way, more in the vein of “I’m pathetic and tired and need my sleep, so I’ve accepted this as my future” way.

Then I entered Lapland, where the sun stops setting for 3 months out of the year, and I found the 9:30 girl … simply ceased to exist.

There is no darkness here to tell you the day is done. Just perpetual golden light at every hour, in every direction, doing absolutely nothing to help you make responsible decisions.

So you don’t.

You hike four times and consider cold water immersion at an ungodly hour.

This is, I have found, the only logical response to 24 hours of sunlight. With this unique and very niche know-how, I’m here to walk you through the five phases of a golden hour that simply never ends.

PHASE 1: The False Logic

Onset: Strikes the moment you land and look out the window at what your body insists should be 3 pm but is actually 11 pm. This becomes your permanent operating system within 24 hours.

Symptoms Include:

• A reasoning process that goes: the sun is up, therefore it is not late, therefore I may do anything I want. This logic is airtight. You will not be taking questions.

• Agreeing to a whale cruise that departs at 11:30 pm and thinking, genuinely, that this is a normal time for an activity. Laplanders accept it, and you will too.

• Starting a bike ride. At midnight. Feeling great about it.

• You’ll hear the phrase “it’s not even that late” leave your mouth at 1 am with complete sincerity.

How To Survive: You don’t. Embrace the false logic. The sun is too convincing anyway. The best you can do is occasionally glance at your phone, feel briefly insane and then carry on with your next activity.

Speaking of activities …

PHASE 2: The Activity Spiral

Onset: Thrives in the absence of a natural stopping point. The day has no ending, nor does your itinerary. You are a perpetual schedule with legs.

Symptoms Include:

• A hike before breakfast, a hike after lunch, a hike instead of dinner. A fourth hike, because why not, the sun is still up.

• Karaoke. At an hour you cannot defend.

• Signing up for things, mushroom foraging, polar dips and midnight drives to nowhere in particular.

• A creeping suspicion that you are doing activities to outrun the fact that you don’t know what time it is or how to stop.

How To Survive: The weirdest part about this phase is you’re never actually tired. You will feel like you slept 10 hours, when you, indeed, did not sleep ten hours. At some point, you will have to physically sit down and do nothing. It will feel wrong because the light outside looks exactly like 4 pm, and your body is confused and furious. But commit and consider it a victory against that giant ball of light in the sky.

PHASE 3: The 9:30 Girl in Witness Protection

Onset: Somewhere between the midnight karaoke and the fourth hike. You catch a glimpse of yourself and don’t quite recognize her.

Symptoms Include:

• Adopting a new identity. Telling yourself you ARE a night person after all. You were always a night person. The previous years of necessary sleep were all lies.

• A strange pride about this consumes you. Like you’ve unlocked something. Like she was the chrysalis and this is who you actually are.

• When someone asks if the team should call it quits, you gasp. Aghast at the thought of stopping. Somehow, you find yourself being the one to suggest the next activity.

• You become the equivalent of a houseplant: Operates best in full sunlight. Do you care? No, you’re too busy running on fumes, the ones the sun provides.

How To Survive: Let the 9:30 girl go. She’ll be waiting when you return to your former residence. Probably with a cup of sleepy-time tea and a very reasonable bedtime.

PHASE 4: Physically Putting Yourself to Bed

Onset: Every single night. The natural cue is not coming. The sky will not darken. The critters will not quiet. Nothing external will tell you that it is time to go to bed. You have to do it yourself, and this is way harder than it sounds.

Symptoms Include:

• Standing in your cabin at 1 am, saying to yourself (out loud) that you are tired, and that it’s time to officially go to sleep.

• Constructing an elaborate blackout situation: pillow over face, eye mask, curtains drawn, sometimes you’ll have to pin a t-shirt to your window, other times you’ll use sheer force of will.

• Lying in bed while golden light seeps through every possible crack in your room, and your brain, fully illuminated, won’t shut off. It’s begging you to go on a walk

• You do want to go for a walk. You are not going for a walk. Please don’t go on a walk.

How To Survive: Parent yourself like the toddler you are, the one who doesn’t know they’re tired. Be firm. Be kind. Tell yourself you did great today. You did four hikes. You earned this sleep.

PHASE 5: The Moon

Onset: Gradual. You won’t notice until you notice.

Symptoms Include:

• A vague memory that the moon ever existed.

• No follow-up thoughts on this. It’s a really weird feeling to not see the moon for 3 months.

She’s up there. You just can’t see her. But I guess the moon needs her rest, too.

There’s no real lesson here. Just an acknowledgement that living in a place where the sun doesn’t set is just as unhinged as you think it is. It runs on its own logic, absolutely unbothered by the usual order of things.

But it’s also a really good time.

To get to be the girl who does four hikes and debates polar dips at 1 am and then forgets, temporarily, that the moon exists.

Plus, she’ll be back. The 9:30 girl. The moon. The responsible bedtime.

But tonight the sun is still up.

There are many levels of friendship.

But there’s one type that doesn't get nearly enough attention: Travel’s For-One-Time-And-One-Time-Only Friend.

I like to think of it as the original situationship. The person, or persons, you meet on a whim, somewhere in the world, who you briefly share some kind of epic high with, a sight, an experience, an unintentional disaster, and then say goodbye to, knowing you’ll probably never cross paths again. There are no boundaries, it’s casual and they’ll be in and out of your life so fast you probably couldn't provide their last name if pressed.

I met two of mine on a floating sauna in Tasmania. It was 10 am, and the small wooden box, with a giant glass window overlooking the lake, was fully booked. I was tagging along to a conference with my husband of the trail-building variety. Fun fact, I know nothing about trail-building, so my day’s agenda included no real plans other than a sweat session.

Travel itself creates the conditions for a specific, accelerated kind of intimacy between humans that is almost impossible to recreate when you’re home.

So imagine what sweating with strangers does.

We didn’t know each other for approximately six minutes. The three of us bonded over witnessing a budding romance between a Brit and a Finn who were also in the sauna. As we finished up and changed out of our swimsuits, Chelsea turned to Sarah and me. In a dry, deadpan Gen-Z cadence, she said, “So what are you girly pops doing today? I think we’re giving bestie energy.”

We made plans to reconvene at Lot 40, a restaurant in the middle of Derby, at 2 pm for a pre-hike debrief. I did have a friend with me, someone I actually knew, so I convinced Victoria to rally with pastries and two new friends who seemed, by all available evidence, legit.

At Lot 40, the four of us ran into James, the operator of the sauna, a wealth of knowledge, who was unironically rocking his classic Australian cowboy hat.

“Well, how ya going, gals?”

“Where would you go if you could do one hike in Derby?” We cut straight to the point.

“Aw mate, too easy. Mount Victoria. She’s a lookah and 5k round trip.”

That was truly the only information we were given, but it was good enough for us.

The fact that the trailhead was difficult to find should have been our first clue about what was in store. The sign on the entry gate that read Severe Hazard Area should have been our second. And the bog that cut the trail clean in half, twenty feet in, should have been our third

“No, it’s okay, I work with bogs a lot,” Chelsea stated. Who am I to question a stranger?

The tactic was simple: strategically place, and with as little weight as possible, your foot onto any piece of wood that appeared to be floating, whilst clutching the closest tree with your entire body. Rinse and repeat.

“Is this a bad time to ask about snakes?” I heard Sarah whisper from behind me.

We made it through with only one casualty. Sarah’s left foot was wearing approximately half of Tasmania, as we pressed on. Victoria provided a quick rundown on snake protocol per everyone’s request. Confidence was not inspired.

The trail moved through open forest, and the trail markers left little to be desired. Someone had taken a Sharpie on a piece of yellow poster paper and nailed it to a small tree. Mount Victoria This Way it read, an arrow also in Sharpie pointing right. This is where the beautiful and open forest ended, and the trail crescendoed in an intense vertical fashion. *I really need to get better at checking elevation profiles.

I wish I could remember the name of the flora that came next, but it has to be the origin of the term “Australian Bush”. All we could see in front of us was a pencil-thin trail with dense, tall, grabbing hedges on either side. The narrow path was just wide enough to walk single file with arms raised above our heads, so we continued. We were committed at this point, and I’m not one to call it quits in the midst of a dilemma, especially with people I don’t actually know. We were just unprepared enough to be tackling this hike in shorts and t-shirts, getting ripped to shreds by this shrub. In retrospect, it was also not a great choice for a hike in a country known for its snakes.

Then we entered a boulder field. With REALLY big boulders. I actually can’t even complain about it because it was a welcome reprieve from the bush. It gave us enough of a break in the view to see where we were actually headed. A jagged ridgeline of rocks ascending high above our heads.

“The girly pops can do it,” I said, doing my best impression of someone with confidence.

We were just shy of actual rock climbing, firmly in the boulder bracket. Near what we were fairly convinced was the top, I heard a dry, deadpan Gen-Z cadence, “It’s giving summit.”

It was indeed … not the summit. Turns out, when you're navigating through the bush with Sharpie trail markers and borrowed confidence, a wrong turn is guaranteed. But then we finally made it. Bloodied, arms and legs of all parties ripped to pieces, but oh so happy.

“TOOOOO EASY,” we howled collectively into the wind, in our best Australian accent. High-pitched cackles reverberated off the rock walls around us, as the slang term coined by our buddy James had now been officially commandeered by us - The Girly Pops.

We have a cultural story about friendships that last, and understandably so. Those friendships are real, and they deeply matter. But I think we undervalue the other kind. You know, the ones that are perfect precisely because they are complete. A short story instead of a novel. And most of the time, the For-One-Time-And-One-Time-Only Friend is just an inspirational caption in our lives.

A stranger only knows you as the brave person who walked through the bog without complaining.

We all waved like we were saying goodbye to old friends as we pulled out of the parking lot in our respective vehicles. The weird weight of melancholy punched me in the gut, as it always does when I say goodbye to someone.

I couldn’t tell you their last names. But I can tell you we just conquered a mountain together.

Isn’t it fun that somewhere out there is a friend, even if it was for just a brief moment, telling the same story about me and how her sauna ended on a mountain top.

Now say it with me in a dry, deadpan Gen-Z cadence, It’s giving … travel.

A few years ago, I adopted the phrase No Plans, Just Vibes for any and all trips. It started because I asked a good friend to create a Google Doc for an upcoming excursion. When I opened it, the page was blank, except for the words, “No plans just vibes” at the top.

Henceforth, it has become our slogan.

If you think about it, it’s really the perfect mentality for traveling. If anything goes wrong, it’s fine. No plans, just vibes, remember? And if the winds of luck shift in your favor, you’re loose enough to seize whatever opportunity they’ve blown your way.

However, I’ve been told that sometimes having a plan makes sense. And this story is in favor of the occasional plan.

It was 2011.

Emily, Damo and I had spent two weeks galavanting through Italy on our shoestring budget. Two months in, and we had already formed the intense bond that usually happens when humans are thrown into a weird world together and forced to adapt. A Canadian, an Australian and an American set out on a wish and a prayer and, most importantly, a dream to eat a lot of pasta.

I had a 6-month Eurail pass, so Emily and Damo agreed to use trains in Italy, as long as we could start by flying into Milan.

I’d like to claim that we absorbed enormous amounts of culture and knowledge, but truthfully, we ate a lot of really cheap (but insanely delicious) pizza and took in as much culture as 21-year-olds who are in Europe for the first time can. At the end of a debaucherous two weeks, we were all headed our separate ways. Emily was headed to Ireland for a family trip, and Damo had two extra days in Italy with a hotel room booked in Berlin to see one more place before the spring break ended.

Looking back, I can’t really tell you what I thought my next step was. It seems insane to think that I just planned on taking the train all the way back to Denmark directly from the bottom of Italy, but admittedly, it’s also not out of the realm of possibility for logistics I typically come up with. Sometimes, I think I might have a disposition toward suffering voluntarily when it comes to travel.

Either way, on our last night together, Damo suggested I meet him in Berlin. He had a quote, “3-star hotel” reserved, which felt like an absolute luxury after the places we had been crashing.

“Easy, I’ll just take the train,” I agreed, like someone who’s never laid eyes on a map. Don’t add cartographer to my list of special skills.

The train route was from Sorrento to Berlin. A 36-hour route, which, I’m sure you’ll be shocked to hear, is not on Eurail’s Trip Guide List.

The plan, and I use that word VERY generously, was to meet at “the train station” in Berlin. Which train station, you ask? That’s a great question. We didn’t discuss that minor detail.

We just said goodbye, and off I went.

The idea of Eurail is romantic in the same way that being a backpacker seems romantic. Coated in layers of nostalgia, being carefree and that “leave everything behind” attitude. In practice, it’s a lot less carefree and a lot more effort.

Note to all those tempted to use Eurail passes in the future: reservations are very important.

I made it to Florence around 8 pm, with a plan to catch the overnight train to Berlin that was departing two hours later, at 10. What I didn’t have, it turns out, was a proper seat reservation.

As I mentioned, a wish and a prayer and little to no knowledge about how the world moves around me. I also think this is a good time to point out that smartphones weren’t really a big thing yet. I had a phone where I would switch the e-SIM in and out, but it really only operated like a flip phone. I couldn’t look things up unless I went to an internet cafe or begged a stranger for help.

The Italian ticket conductor, a man who had no time for my … let’s call it bullshit, looked at my pass, looked at me, shouted something at me in Italian and then gestured vaguely toward a fold-down seat in the corridor between cars. Exhaustion and annoyance were understandably written all over his face.

I sat down in what was essentially a jump seat. In my opinion, this kind of seat exists solely for the philosophical exercise of sitting. It folded out from the wall, barely big enough to accommodate the breadth of my rear-end. The overhead light flickered incessantly. A perfect scene for rethinking all of the choices that led me to that very specific moment in time.

I sat there for 14 hours as the train made its way through the dark, up through Italy, then Austria, through whatever anonymous stretch of darkness lies between Florence and Germany.

I have a catalog of internal pep talks. One for any given situation I may find myself in. But this ride had no file.

I made it to Berlin midday. Damo’s flight was getting in later that night, around 7 pm, so I had time to kill. It was my first time in the city. Having done little to no research, a theme it seems, I wandered. I watched the city move around me with the pleasant detachment of someone who hadn’t slept in over 24 hours, running on fumes and espresso and a brat, extra saurkraut.

I waited all day.

As evening came on, I figured it was time to head to the train station to meet him. Simple enough. Except for one thing, both Damo and I had not considered, or once thought to look up, or even have the data to check:

Berlin has more than one train station.

This is a well-known fact about Berlin, or any other European city for that matter, presumably, to anyone who has ever thought about it for more than thirty seconds.

It has multiple train stations.

Of course it does.

Clearly, I had not thought about it for more than thirty seconds.

So I picked a station, and I waited. I watched people arrive and embrace and leave. I watched the time boards flip. And I never saw Damo.

My phone had nearly no service. My bank account, as a student on a stipend, had four dollars in it. Not four dollars as a figure of speech. Four actual US dollars. That detail is vivid in my memory.

I waited until there was nothing left to do but accept that what was happening was in fact happening.

So that night, I slept in the train station.

The next day was Easter morning, so I awoke to a choir and string quartet belting hymns as they moved through the terminal. People running left and right all around me. I peeled myself off the metal bench, eyes crusty and mind not fully present from another night of navigating no sleep. It felt like a fever dream.

I took the first train out at 7 am. I’d stared at the board all night, willing it to turn over to now departing. I watched Berlin disappear behind me and thought, I really hope Damo enjoyed the 3-star hotel.

When I got back to my dorm 5 hours later, I opened my computer. I had 57 new Facebook messages. From Damo.

“Did you make it to Berlin yet?”

…

“Caroline, answer me.”

…

“I’m at my hotel. I forgot to tell you the name of it.”

I hadn't even thought to ask where he was staying.

Damo and I laughed about it a lot. It has become, like most travel disasters, a better story than anything that could have gone right.

No Plans, Just Vibes.

Except for which train station, and maybe the name of the hotel.

I chased lightning bugs when I was little.

I’d run around in the backyard with my sisters, out of breath, reaching my arms out in front of me, clasping my palms together quickly to capture this silly bug.

The oldest of three, I played art director, making sure they caught enough, then showing Hollins and Ansley when and where to release them, so that we could maximize the glow.

I always made sure to give the lightning bugs enough wiggle room to crawl around within the cage I’d created with my own two hands. Sometimes I’d spread my fingers slightly, just a smidge, to peek through with one eye and see the way they illuminated on and off like a light switch in the darkness.

One steamy summer night, the air thick with southern humidity, the kind where it feels like you’re inside a dog’s mouth, my sisters and I spent the entire night catching our own personal “collection”. We filled an entire jar, which we promptly carried into our home and released, so that they could “be free”.

Panic ensued.

We had to turn off every light in the house to find the lightning bugs again.

The brief season when you actually get to see lightning bugs (or fireflies, if that’s what you grew up calling them) feels almost as fleeting as that memory.

More often than I like to admit, my mind likes to dig into the arsenal of nostalgia it has tucked away in the basement floor of my brain. Those raw, tender moments sometimes feel like they get pulled out of someone else’s archive of film and thrown up onto a projector without warning, and I’m the only one in the audience.

Like a regular road trip with my family to the lake that sat thirty minutes away. We’d belt “Pink Houses” off the John Mellencamp cassette that lived in the fourteen-year-old bright red Dodge my Dad drove. On the way home, we’d stop at Sonic for a large chili cheese dog, and I wasn’t allowed to order a Dr. Pepper because it made me too hyper.

I don’t have a photo of that. It was just a Tuesday night.

And yet…

That Tuesday has outlasted a hundred moments that were “supposed” to be more important.

So much has changed, and sitting in those moments always feels bittersweet, a grief, in its own weird way. Everything is different, and I can’t get back there. No one talks about that part enough, how the ordinary things are actually the really big things, and you usually figure that out right around the time you can’t get them back.

I’ve been thinking about how we do the same thing when we travel, because being somewhere new feels like that sometimes, too.

We always aim for the highlights: the tour we booked three months out, the mountain top view at golden hour, the train ride that’s going to make people seethe with jealousy (Fine, I’ll ADMIT it). We build itineraries around the moments we’ve already decided will matter the most, and then we document them in real time, which is itself its own kind of departure from where we are, one that I am indeed very guilty of.

And then, years later, that’s not even what I remember.

We came out of the mountain range, sweaty and covered in a layer of dust. We’d taken a dip in a glacial stream, but with no way to effectively dry off, it had just made the gritty dirt stick to us more. I didn’t really have a clue where we were going to come out of the trail, but when we did, our shuttle driver, Suri, was waiting there. With a giant block of Feta and wild strawberries that were strung onto a long blade of grass.

I wouldn’t be able to tell you the name of the town we finished in if I tried, or honestly, what most of the trail we rode looked like. But I remember the excitement on Suri’s face when he saw our reaction to his gift.

Shaggy and I had just come off Lake Toya to treat ourselves to an ice cream after paddleboarding across. A Japanese man, who was having a great time with his own bottle of Sake, spotted Shaggy’s beard, which is, admittedly, a spectacle. He laughed, a deep, guttural HA HA HA, and was so delighted by this unfamiliar, chest-length red facial hair that he walked straight up to Shaggy and buried his face in it. Then he took a step backward and just began stroking the beard, all of us collectively laughing.

A moment that was definitely not listed in our guidebook, but I still remember the smell of the plastic bottle of sake he thrust upon us, which Shaggy bravely took a swig of.

We’d just finished a big kayak trip together. An actual feat of mountain-moving measures because time and adulthood and living in states separated by multiple states make it way harder than it should be to see each other.

We didn’t see any whales, which was the real draw of taking the tour, but the puffins were out in full force, and the peaks visible from the fjord were honestly enough to make the entire trip worth it.

The three of us, Hollins, Ansley and I, got into the car to drive back into Seward. When Hollins pulled up her phone to connect it to the radio. We chattered and fussed at each other, because … sisters, and then we heard that distinctive guitar riff come through the stereo. We rolled down our windows, turned the song Hollins had selected all the way up and started in, “Well, there’s winners and there’s losers, but they ain’t no big deal…” Pink Houses blasting through the speakers and our voices wafting into the wind as we hollered the lyrics.

Every time I’m somewhere, I think about how I’ll never be able to fully return to it. That sounds way more depressing than I intend for it to be, because I actually think there’s so much beauty in that statement.

You can go back to a place, but you can’t go back to the version of yourself who was there the first time. Sometimes, I think I always make sure to take the bad quality iPhone photo because a part of me is already grieving the memory I’m standing in. The moment you leave, it becomes this intangible thing that you’ll only ever half remember. All of those weird, wacky, human moments that actually made the place a place won’t happen again.

Fleeting. All of it.

The backyards. The Tuesdays. The trip you spent your life savings on. The trip you just took down the road. The humans that weave in and out of your stories.

It was the cusp of summer last year and almost my niece’s bedtime, but we went outside. In her mismatched pajamas that were haphazardly thrown on, her tie-dye crocs and a cookie in hand, I helped her chase the glowing lights we saw blinking like a light switch on and off in the night.

I should have mentioned that lightning bugs make me sentimental.

Now go catch some.

I’ll start with the directive.

We had been riding … or pushing, or suffering, or whatever you would like to call what was happening, for what felt like the better part of a decade. Frankly, my legs had ceased being legs and become something more like decorative attachments. The landscape, which I will admit was objectively stunning, stretched out in every direction with absolutely no regard for what I needed it to do, which was end.

Orgest, our guide, paused. Whipped his around to Amanda and me. Looked at us with an expression I can only describe as pure, solid, unadulterated annoyance, and said, “No talking. One hour.”

He continued moving forward with his bike.

Anger bubbled from the ground up inside my body. “How DARE he say….” I started, channeling all of the steam pouring out of me towards Amanda, expecting her to be on my side.

She swiped her fingers across her neck, the universally accepted sign for not right now.

“No, I think he actually might be correct in this instance,” she murmured. Absolute betrayal. But with huge eyes and raised eyebrows, she gave me a look that signaled we might actually need to lock in.

I thought about it for a beat. Scrunched my lips together with a “hmph.”

“Okay,” I caved. “That’s fair.”

It had all started with such promise, as these 1type 2 adventures usually do.

We were shuttled into the Albanian mountains as far as the 4x4 would take us, which I now know is a relative concept in Albania, and if not Albania, at least with Orgest. He’d been with us for 7 days, Amanda, Leslie and me, leading us through the backcountry of Kosovo, North Macedonia and Albania on mountain bikes for a project.

The road narrowed, but the forest opened up, giving way to a house nestled under the mountain range. I couldn’t believe a car made it up here, let alone people living day-to-day. Orgest stopped to approach the house and ask whoever was living there for directions. Soon, an entire family, multiple generations, poured out of the home built from a collaborative effort of wood, metal and hay. A girl no older than ten approached us, she was the only one who seemed to know much English.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, unable to fathom why American women would be in the high alpine of Albania. Or maybe she sensed our mild delusion of thinking this day was approachable.

“We’re going to ride our bikes here,” we answered. Her incredulous smile creeping up her cheeks let me know she thought that was delusional as well.

They invited us in for coffee, but we didn’t have time.

“No, we keep going,” Orgest stated.

After convincing Leslie we really did need to go, we set back on our off-roading mission. Many waves and cheers and car miles later, we were unloading our bikes and finally starting the ride.

Maybe a mile or two in, though at this point we had not yet received word of how long the ride actually was, we came across a twelve-year-old shepherd.

We saw him in the distance. A figure moving up the hillside and wrangling the sheep with such ease, it seemed almost impossible. When we got closer, we realized he was on an old Trek mountain bike almost too big for him.

It was a genius move, really. If you have to get your chores done, might as well make it a good time.

“What are you doing here?” he asked Orgest in Albanian. Orgest told him our planned route, and the kid guffawed. Foreshadowing I should have actually paid attention to.

“What did he say?” Amanda asked Orgest, as we started another ascent further into the open wilderness.

“Oh, he is in shock at how much we are riding,” Orgest chuckled.

I took that chuckle lightly. I am very aware and proud of my capabilities for self-induced suffering. I’ve had years of practice being dragged into big adventures like this by my husband. But looking back, that chuckle should have triggered alarm bells. I will blame it on my full trust in Orgest as well as my lack of awareness as to the plan. Note to self: ask more questions.

The shepherd looked at us with mild interest, our bikes with more, and then he moved on. But not without subtly showing off that he knew how to handle a natural drop in the hillside.

Amanda, Leslie and I trudged on with little to no urgency. We were singing, taking pictures, laughing and admiring the views. At every break, Orgest urged us to keep going. Eye rolls ensued. Seven days in, a brotherly-sisterly dynamic had firmly taken hold.

That’s when the concretness of our itinerary was mentioned.

“We have only gone seventeen kilometers, and we have 48 total for the day.”

I did very slow arithmetic in my head, standing there on a ridge in Albania.

“Orgest, WHAT?”

“We’re going 48 kilometers!?” Amanda hollered.

11 miles into a 30-mile day. It was 3 p.m.

He pressed on, ignoring us, and understandably. He had, I think, probably already delivered this information.

“We keep going,” he said. Not a question.

So, we kept going.

The lightning arrived around 4 p.m. Dark clouds loomed high above us, right as we reached the top of the ridgeline. Open field stretched out before us, no shelter in sight except for a small cluster of tall trees in the distance.

“We need to go there,” Orgest said. “But do it carefully.”

I have always known that in a fight-or-flight situation, I am a flight girl. Thankfully, Amanda was on board. We barreled down the hill with our mountain bikes, no sense of calm in our demeanor whatsoever, narrowly missing the boulders scattered throughout the field.

We huddled under the trees. Orgest calmly ran Amanda through what to do if something happened to him. I craned my neck towards him. Are we at that point, I thought, beginning to mentally spiral. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Amanda pull out her phone in a theatrical fashion and whisper into it: “Zac, if you see this…” to which my response was to grab it, rotate it towards me and say, “Shaggy, if you’re seeing this…”

“Oh come on ladies, pull it together,” Leslie said, and in all fairness, she was right.

I would like to note, for anyone with a passing familiarity with lightning safety, that sheltering under trees is famously not the recommended approach, but I did not bring this up, as it was indeed the only form of shelter available to us. There are moments in travel where you outsource your judgment entirely to others, and you simply commit to that arrangement and hope for the best.

We sat under the trees, hunkered low and tight in our rain jackets, as the storm moved across the ridge above us. I ate a granola bar.

Eventually it passed.

“We keep going,” Orgest said.

The descent, when we finally reached it, was the cruelest joke of the day. And keep in mind, this was a day that had already told several.

We had been promised a descent. I think I requested one that makes your face go involuntarily slack with joy, the one that gets a hoot and a holler and “hell yeah” as you rip down it. We peered over the edge.

It was … entirely rocks. Not pebbles. Rocks. Chunky, big, baby heads as we like to call them in the “bike biz”. One wrong move, and you were looking at a cracked rim or flat tire or an involuntary over-the-handlebars maneuver.

So, we walked our bikes down the hill. Every single step.

Actually, that’s not fair. Amanda did indeed attempt to ride a line or two and succeeded. I just didn’t have it in me.

When we finally reached the bottom, and I looked back up at the trail, I felt the complex emotional cocktail of pride and fury. I also probably just needed a snack, but we made it. We conquered the route, with time to spare.

Now, back to the directive.

Amanda and I were a giggle fit. Leslie was somewhere behind taking photos. We had accomplished the mission, and Suri, our sweet shuttle driver, would be around the corner somewhere waiting to grab us.

We were weaving around a funny water channel. Where is the end, I thought to myself, but not actually that worried. We continued goofing off, adding flowers to our hair, singing along the way. And that is when Orgest told us we weren’t allowed to talk for an hour.

He dropped the big bomb on us right after. “We have two more massive climbs,” he said. And the sun was beginning to set.

In his defense, I can’t imagine there being a worst-case scenario for a guide, and he did apologize, as did we, at the collective chaos that we were all experiencing together.

The three of us, Amanda, Leslie and I, all took different approaches to conquering the final hills.

Somewhere, I decided I wouldn’t let Orgest outpace me. I think mentally I needed a goal and someone to chase. Amanda went inward, choosing the path of least resistance, and deciding to be completely zen with the pain and the hill and the fact that her legs were cracked. Leslie was taking pictures, moving at her own pace.

We finished in the dark.

I mean that literally. The last stretch, the final climb, was guided by moonlight and the faith that the gravel road in front of us went straight ahead. When we reached the top, on a main highway, Suri couldn’t have been a better sight. He handed each of us a date cookie, knowing that all four of us needed a pick-me-up. After eleven hours on a bike, we all piled in the car, laughing, mainly out of relief at what had just happened. It’s always easy to immediately forget a miserable pursuit as soon as it’s over and sustenance is in hand.

The hotel had held dinner for us. We were two hours past the final window. When we walked in for our dirtbag dinner, muddy and emptied out, with the staff looking at us like we were from another planet.

Orgest, who had famously told us he did not drink beer, sat down, called the hotel manager over, and said, “I would like a very big beer.”

Me too Orgest, me too. We raised our glasses.

“Keep going!” we all laughed. “Orgest, you dirty dawg,” our motto and mutual term of endearment for him.

I don’t know exactly what we earned that day, or even what we learned, out on those Albanian ridges. Maybe it was respect, or just the natural thing that happens between people who have been through something together and made it out the other side? Or maybe, we just earned a good story.

Plus, we all finished those beers.

Clearing out files on my computer yesterday, I found a funny blurb I wrote to myself three years ago when I quit my job to spend the summer in Japan. I can’t even remember why I wrote it if I’m being honest with you. My favorite part of the whole discovery is that I got distracted and never wrote another word about the entire experience.

So here it is, the thing I wrote to myself at 33, unedited:

I’m sitting on a balcony in Japan, looking at a volcano as I write this. That sentence feels like something I would have written in my 20s. A time when I loved being chaotic and messy because I felt like I was allowed to be chaotic and messy. It was liberating to use every opportunity in the bucket to make bold decisions. My solution to problems was to leave, travel and experience. My very vanilla and poetic defiance against, well, everything. I spent my 20s creating independence, playing in dirt and stretching wings I always secretly knew were there.

Now, well into my 30s, this “adventure,” if you will, feels less defiant and more aligned with everything I had always envisioned for myself. I was just too scared to admit it. Strange how we can’t see the foreshadowing of our own life. The foreshadowing that tells us exactly what we want if we would just simply pay attention. Instead, it took a global pandemic and this stupid knee injury that knocked me on my ass to recognize what I wanted, or at least, give me the push to go after what I needed.

When Shaggy told me he was offered an opportunity to build mountain bike trails in Japan, going with him felt like a combination of a no-brainer wrapped in “oh f*ck”. You know that old saying, “when one door shuts, another one opens”? Well, what they forgot to add is, “but it usually comes with a side of big scary life changes that you have to follow through with”. I did it, though. At 33 years old, I quit the adult thing, whatever that actually means. I packed my life into one airline-regulated duffel (plus a bike bag) for a few months. I walked away from financial comfort, prepared to dig into savings (send help, I worked really hard for those savings) to make this work, without a fully formed plan for what is next.

I think this is the part where I’m supposed to say I’m scared, but the truth is I’m not. I get to go be alive in a place I’ve never been alive before. I want to add the adjective brave back to my resume. I want to stand on top of a mountain and scream, “I decide” at the world. I want to just BE. And maybe in some weird way, my “just being” will let someone else know that they are allowed to “just be” as well.

The day I left, Grandmother asked me, sarcasm leaking out of her, if I was trying to “find myself”. I spent the entirety of my 20s doing that. This time around, I think I’m just trying to remember myself. And that is why I’m sitting on a balcony in Japan looking at a volcano as I write this.

I read it back now, the way you’d read a letter from someone you used to know really well. Oh, the DRAMA and theatrics I love to layer into all of those sweet little moments that feel pivotal in my life, only to look back on them with casual fondness, and think, "Wow, that was a good time.” I feel protective of that little weirdo who didn’t know where she was going, but somehow managed to find her own particular brand of terrified clarity in that, anyway. (To be clear, I still have no idea where I’m going, but it no longer feels like a big looming cloud that precariously dangles over my head). So rooted in all of her deep feelings, she wanted to prove to everyone that this is what she wanted the whole time.

What she didn’t write, because she didn’t know it yet:

She would spend four months in Japan and fall into a rhythm she hadn’t felt since she was a little kid. She would get really good at being lost and only mildly okay at being found. She would eat a lot of things that she wouldn’t be able to outright identify. She actually would stand on top of Mount Fuji exactly once and hilariously not scream anything because it turns out standing on top of a volcano is really windy, and you’re mostly just focused on not falling.

She would come home in an absolute spiral, still without a clue as to the next step. Claiming she needed bangs, to which her good friend would provide the age-old feminine wisdom, “You can’t not have a job AND get bangs.”

Secretly scouring the internet for fast hacks to become an influencer, until she broke down crying at the dinner table because she needed to make money, and that’s not how she wanted to do it.

She would be completely changed in a lot of ways, but also exactly the same. Just slightly repositioned. Kind of like the couch, you move two inches to the left, and suddenly the feng shui is much better. No big a-ha moment occurred, but even if it did, she wasn’t going to pay attention to it.

Here’s what I’d write back to her now, that woman on the balcony:

Absolutely nothing will come together how you thought it would, but that’s life’s poetic defiance against you.

So just take a deep breath. You’ll figure it out.

Oh, and PS. Your grandmother still thinks you’re out here trying to find yourself, but now she’s taking your article to dinner so her friends can read it. She even called to tell you, “There’s never been a writer in the family.” A compliment and a slight, only a grandmother can achieve.

Here’s to the messy choices, am I right?

A note on being a tourist before we begin: I think the funniest thing about being a tourist is that most of the time all we want is to not to be a tourist. We show up at world-renowned sites and destinations the guidebook has suggested, only to be frustrated that we aren't the only ones who had the idea. “Ugh, there are so many tourists here,” we say, as tourists ourselves. Ever in search of the "authentic" experience, we seek out places where only locals go, places where you won’t find other tourists. Which honestly just isn't a reality, because no matter where you travel, the very fact that you are foreign means you are, indeed, a tourist.

Enter the Hammam.

Leslie and I had been riding bikes for five days. Since we’d been high in the Atlas mountains, hot water wasn’t a commodity, so we’d forgone showers. We were dirty, to say the least, covered in a layer of grime, but all smiles. When we made it to Marrakech, our riad for the night had offered spa options arranged through them, and we had politely declined.

We’re not regular travelers, we’re cool travelers. We were going to get a local experience.

We wanted to bathe with the women of Marrakech.

After minimal online research, I found an option. We walked deep into the Medina to find it, and the door was unassuming. All signs were pointing to what we were looking for.

“Yes, but is this a local one?” Leslie asked. As we saw one or two European women exit the entryway shaped in that iconic horseshoe arch.

“I read that this feels very local. I don’t know what that means.”

We were given a “menu” to look through, as I watched Moroccan women go straight to the front desk and into the Hammam.

“Okay, so it seems like there’s an avenue for the white people here,” I laughed. The menu, so to speak, provided a very basic guide to what would happen.

Soap. Steam. Scrub. Clay. Wash.

We were pulled through the entryway and taken to a counter with many baskets. No one spoke English. Why would they? Arabic or French is the common language here. The woman at the counter handed us a basket and a plastic kit that included an exfoliating glove, black soap, and disposable underwear. She pointed around the corner.

I followed her finger, trying to look like I’d done this before. I glanced back at Leslie, whose facial expression held everything I was feeling.

Every woman around us was topless and moving forward into the Hammam.

“I think we change and put our clothes in this,” I held the basket up, also looking at Leslie like, what is happening?

“Here? In the open,” she squeaked.

“I guess!?”

So we stripped down. Giggling uncontrollably as we did so, but trying to keep it under wraps, because that’s typically how Americans handle public nudity. There were signs everywhere that read Keep Underwear On At All Times. Actually, I’m not completely positive they said that; I just inferred that from the image provided and Google Translate.

Leslie sat down on the bench in the disposable underwear and crossed her arms around her chest.

“I want a robe,” she said, a mix of exasperation and laughter. The absurdity of us.

Two older women saw we were ready, and they tapped us. Indicating we should follow them. We moved through the large main room, into a smaller one with tables and women bathing, and through that room into another.

It was a tiled open space with low faucets or variations of spigots distributed across the room. It was full of women chattering and bathing themselves, each with their own unique routine, like they’d figured it out over years of Saturdays in this exact room.

The elder ladies who had guided us in situated two stools in the back corner. Which felt appropriate. Let’s put the confused white women in the back, so they don’t disrupt this special ritual.

One of the women, who was half the size of me, wore a black t-shirt with a giant heart on the front. She grabbed a large bucket of hot water and just … dumped it on me. Then she pulled the black soap from my kit and started working it into my skin, tapping me to do the same. I cut my eyes to the side. Leslie was getting the same treatment.

Then the two women left. Leslie and I looked at each other, sitting on our short stools. Knees folded, almost to our chins.

“I guess we just wait?”

And wait, we did. Every few minutes, we’d both rub our skin again. Acting like there was any soap left to rub. It had all soaked in since it was a natural, olive-based gel paste, and the steam in the room was doing its work.

We figured they would come get us when they needed us.

So eventually, they did. Each guiding us to a separate table. The woman helping me (in her heart t-shirt) took a bucket, which there seemed to be no shortage of, and threw it across the table to clean it off. I was already committed to the community stew at that point, so I climbed on. I lay face-up, and she just shook her head and gave me the motion to roll over, so I quickly did. I was trying to act like I knew what I was doing, remember. Then, she picked up the exfoliating glove.

I can confirm I lost an entire layer of skin that day.

When I flipped back over, and she sat me up, she dug into my arms and gave me a look that communicated, clearly, no shared language needed: Girl, you’re doing a bad job. Take care of your skin.

I just shook my head, teeth gritted, arms up: I know. I’m a filthy animal. Please forgive me.

Then she left.

Moments later, she came back and started slapping black mud all over my body. I lay there on my stomach, covered in the mystery mud, trying to act calm, cool and collected. But no one was paying attention to me anyway, which is, honestly, one of the very greatest gifts of travel.

After a while, I felt a tap on my shoulder. She pulled me off the table and over to Leslie. We were back on stools, this time directly in front of the door. Mine was slightly off to the side, but Leslie’s was head-on, front and center, a direct window to the front desk where all the baskets were. Women just casually walking around us as they entered the Hammam.

The two women who had been on this journey with us the entire time grabbed more buckets and began dousing us with the water every few seconds, somehow reapplying soap at the same time. I was tapped to stand up. My butt directly in Leslie’s face as wonderful heart t-shirt tugged open the disposable underwear and shoved soap down there.

When they were done with me, they moved on to Leslie. She stood up, hands in the air, succumbing to the experience. Her head bobbled around with her eyes closed, as she was yanked and pulled and cleaned.

And then we both began laughing.

Big giggles oozing out of us. No longer able to contain them. Laughing, not at the ritual, but at how out of our box we were.

The two older women, trying to remain stone cold, finally broke. They began laughing with us. All four of us finally in on the joke.

After a few more bucket douses, they tapped our heads and squeezed our faces. Then they disappeared, coming back with two big towels.

Heart t-shirt tapped Leslie’s hip.

Leslie was so completely committed to the bit at this point that she took that as a sign to take the disposable underwear off. She shrugged her shoulders and gave a look that said okay, whatever you want, I’ll do. And she bent over and took her underwear off.

It is at this time that I would like to remind everyone of the signs that read, “Do not take your underwear off”.

Commotion erupted. All eyes on us. The woman in charge of us frantically grabbed the towel and wrapped her up, and then we all laughed. Shaking her head, throwing it back with a laugh and a big smile and a secretive wink. Thank God, I’m done with you two.

When we went to collect the baskets with our belongings, Heart T-shirt was there in her own bathrobe. She gave us a nod and a thumbs-up. It was now her turn.

The next day, we went cycling with a Moroccan woman named Yasmina. We mentioned that we had gone to the hammam. She lit up.

“I looooove the Hammam. I do this every week, and have my full routine. I stay there for hours, and I just gossip and bathe. It’s spiritual for me.”

I nodded slowly, making eye contact with Leslie, communicating the collective hilarity we had experienced with just our facial expressions.

“You know, I think spiritual is definitely how we would describe it.”

Isn't it funny that when we go somewhere new, all we want is to blend in? To act like a culture that is so very different from our own is second nature to us. As if the very reason we're there — because we want to experience a new world and the people who live in it — is something to be embarrassed about.

When those women squeezed my face, it felt like I passed the test. Oh, sweetie, at the very least you tried, is what I heard in that funny little pat on my head. And you know what, I would try it again and again. Because what a beautiful ritual the hammam is, and how lucky am I to experience even a sliver of someone else’s culture.

Anyways.

I’m a tourist. But I’ll keep my underwear on.