Four trips that changed my life.
The Trip That Opened My World
A little over thirty years ago, I stepped aboard my first airplane, headed off on an adventure that would change my life forever. Little did I know that what I was about to see and experience would shape not only how I saw the world, but literally everything about my life going forward.
When I disembarked in Germany, it was instant obsession. The history, the architecture, the city life, the European sophistication of it all. (I still remember seeing – and taking photos with my disposable camera of – a sex shop on a street outside the airport in Frankfurt.) For someone from small town America, this was like being in Oz, but with a European accent.
Maybe I should explain how a 15-year-old from Iowa ended up in Europe in the first place…
I was lucky enough to have parents who paid for and supported me going on a trip to Germany, Switzerland and the Czech Republic with my high school German class. At this moment, the Universe had perfectly aligned because my German teacher, Herr Pullen, was about to retire, and while our year usually wasn’t permitted to go on these trips, his retirement meant the trip was opened up to all grades. Two of my best friends were going, which meant I was going to annoy the shit out of my parents until they let me go too. They eventually relented, and there I was – scared to death about getting on an airplane for the first time, being away from my family for two weeks, and going somewhere I had only ever seen on a map. Bravery falls off pretty quickly when you are 15 and waving goodbye to your parents at the airport.
What I remember most about that trip was the amount of independence we were given. We were allowed to explore, get lost, and try our best to use the very little German we had learned over the past year. Our chaperones had three rules for free days: you had to eat breakfast with the group, be back for dinner, and be in a minimum group size of three people. It worked out pretty well because, as I mentioned, two of my best friends were also on the trip.
In our 15-year-old minds, we dominated the streets. Fear was basically nonexistent. We were one with Europe – kids playing adults experiencing the world. I do remember the sights, but what I remember most isn’t a particular building or museum or meal. I remember feeling like I belonged there. I couldn’t have told you what that meant at 15, but I just knew that something about being where I was felt strangely familiar, like I had stumbled into a life I didn’t know I was looking for.
Nostalgia comes in strong here because it was a different life back then. No smartphones – and no cell phones, for that matter. Just curiosity and, if you were lucky, a map. We counted on ourselves and other people to get around and somehow made it seem easy. There was no documenting every moment or worrying about how it looked from the outside. You just experienced things as they happened. And that is how I remember it being – and probably why the high of that trip took so long to wear off.
When I came back from Europe, I knew I had to find a way to keep that feeling alive from thousands of miles away. If I couldn’t physically be in Europe, I was going to find another way to get there. So I studied it. I dove into AP History. I took my German classes seriously. I even did two years of independent study in Russian. I wanted to understand the places I had just seen, the history behind them, the languages people spoke, and the world that suddenly felt so much bigger than the one I had known growing up. For me, if my body couldn’t be in Europe, at least my mind could.
I don’t know if everyone from a small town feels this way. Some people are perfectly happy staying close to the world they know, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but something in me had shaken loose. I had seen a version of life that I didn’t know existed, and from that point on, I couldn’t unsee it.
So then the real question became: how long would it take me to get back to Europe?
The Trip That Made Me Fall in Love with Travel
After my high school trip to Germany, I spent most of my time dreaming about going back. This was in the age of travel books, encyclopedias and internet limited to AOL and Napster, so dreaming was really all I had.
Then one day I got a small push from a friend at University in the summer of 2001. He and another friend were planning a trip through Western Europe – Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy were on the table, but no real plans were made for how long in each place. For someone who has always been a planner extraordinaire, the lack of a structured agenda was absolutely horrifying to me, but I was willing to pretend I was a go-with-the-flow type of girl to get back to Europe – especially Italy.
By this time I had declared my major at Lehigh University as History and Political Science (with a focus on European History and European Politics – I told you that first trip shaped my life) and I was itching to get back to Europe. And get back to Europe I did!
I literally remember so much about this trip, which is amazing since I cannot remember what I had for breakfast this morning. The friends I made on this trip, I still have. Drinking Kölsch by the Rhine in the sun. College hijinks and questionable decisions at clubs in Krefeld while sipping on vodka Red Bulls and Long Island Iced Teas. Sleeping on a bench in Venice because we were naïve enough to think we didn’t need to book a hotel during peak summer travel. And sitting at the foot of the Spanish Steps with a bottle of wine surrounded by friends we had made only hours before. When I look back at these snapshots in time all I can do is smile because these moments resulted in some of the best memories of my twenties.
When people hear I like to travel I am often asked about my most memorable moments abroad and this trip gave me the one I always fall back on.
25 years ago I took the subway in Rome from our hotel to the Colosseum. I walked up the metro steps and came upon a busy road with the Colosseum directly on the other side. Going from a modern subway to a massive structure that is almost 2000 years old was a truly magical experience. I couldn’t believe where I was and how lucky I was to be in that moment seeing something like this for the very first time.
Throughout the day I could not get this image out of my head. I had to go back. I ended up returning to the Colosseum alone and watching the sunset, which capped off one of the most amazing experiences of my life. I can still see it, hear the noise of the cars and Vespas passing by, and I still remember the horrible pink Forever 21 dress and platform J.Crew flip-flops I was wearing as I stood there thinking, holy shit, I’m really here.
It’s a strange experience to look back on an unforgettable memory and recapture a feeling you felt years later – knowing now, as you stood there, that it was a profound moment in your life. It’s at this spot, in Rome, that I realized travel has a way of creating completely unrepeatable moments. Even if you return to Rome 100 times, you cannot recreate being 20, stepping out of the subway, and seeing the Colosseum for the first time.
This trip was everything I could have ever wanted from a trip to Europe in my twenties. When people remember “the good ol’ days,” this is what they mean.
After 2001, I continued to go back to Europe throughout my college years – visiting Italy multiple times, Germany again, Ireland, England, Belgium, and France. Safe choices that offered a small peek into what would await me 15 years later. For me, this period of my life was when Europe stopped being a magical place I had visited once and suddenly became somewhere I could actually return to.
The Trip I Took Alone
After my marriage ended, the only thing I knew I had to do was travel. That may be a silly thought when you are thrust into a situation where you have to start your life over again, but I had spent too much time watching the world pass me by – and that part of me from many years ago which had been lying dormant and unfulfilled for far too long was in desperate need of a release.
I had the idea firm in my head, but how do you travel if you don’t have anyone to travel with? This was my first realization that as an adult you can do adult things without other adults. Shocking concept when you have spent most of your adult life in a relationship with someone else. But what should I do? Where should I go?
With ideas swirling in my head and knowing my heart had always belonged to Europe, it seemed an easy choice. As an adult, with time and money at hand, I knew I wouldn’t be reliving my twenties by sleeping on a bench or smashing myself onto an overbooked train in Italy, so when one of my best friends from childhood moved to Denmark, the decision became much easier. I came up with a plan to do a Nordic/Baltic loop, ending in Denmark over Thanksgiving.
I planned everything to a T (and this was before I worked in travel – must have been a sign of what was to come!) – scouting out trendy boutique hotels, restaurants serving local fare, flight schedules and routes for sightseeing that would maximize the ability to wander – literally everything. Even though I had done a decent amount of travelling by this time – and even got robbed in Burkina Faso a month prior – I was still nervous to go truly solo because apparently getting robbed in West Africa wasn’t enough to make me nervous, but eating at a restaurant alone was.
At 36 years old I did not have a lot of experience being truly independent, and absolutely zero experience doing anything alone, but I threw caution to the wind and jumped on a plane bound for Sweden a few weeks later.
The start of my trip was a bit of a blur but I remember the first night I was in Stockholm I literally walked past the restaurant I had scouted out no less than 10 times debating with myself if someone would think I was a freak or not for going in and eating alone. Gumption kicked in (and then swiftly left) because as I pushed through the restaurant door, I instantly felt uncomfortable and weird. The only alternative now was running back through the door like a true crazy person, and I assumed that was far worse than asking if they had a table for one, so I stayed, I ate and I paid my bill and no one looked twice. I even asked the guy eating next to me (who was also alone!) what he recommended for wine.
Afterwards, I went back to my hotel room and cried. Not because I was lonely or sad, but because I was doing something alone for the first time and wasn’t sure how I felt about it. My emotions were at an all time high – was it fun? Was it exciting? Was I drunk? Probably a mix of all three, but I could feel some sort of pride and confidence growing, something I was truly lacking for so, so many years. This was when I understood my life could be whatever I wanted it to be, and all I knew was that I wanted more of whatever this feeling was.
After several days traipsing through Sweden and Finland, I ended up in Latvia. To me, this was the wild west. On the fringe of Europe and somewhere I would have never considered going before – and honestly was only there because it was on my natural geographic travel loop. What was funny though was that I ended up wandering around the city and after one day, I absolutely fell in love with Riga. It was November, gloomy AF, and I truly loved it. I loved that I was one of the few tourists there, loved that I didn’t know the language AT ALL, loved the history and architecture, loved all the photos I took from the winding cobblestoned alleyways, and maybe even more importantly, I loved that I was there alone.
Standing in Old Town Riga, it was at this point that I knew I was a traveler and wanted to see the world. The tears had since dried from Stockholm and I was in my element. I continued on to Estonia (absolutely loved Tallinn, one of my favorite cities in Europe) followed by Lithuania, then finishing up with Thanksgiving in Denmark, as planned.
Two weeks later as I boarded my flight back to Boston, I found myself with paper and pen in hand planning my next trip: Japan (invite from my bestie Jen!), and then back to Germany for the New Year with a side trip to Luxembourg.
And then a funny thing happened. That trip snowballed into the next one: Bulgaria, Serbia, Austria, Germany, Hungary, Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan. And then the next one: Romania, Moldova, Belarus, Armenia and Kazakhstan. Followed by the next one…
At this point, I was addicted. I was expanding my borders, opening my mind to the world, and I was growing into a person that I barely recognized from a year earlier. I knew at some point I would have to get back to the real world – find a job, maybe fall in love again, and be more present in my life in Boston – so I gave myself a goal: visit every country in Europe by November 2018.
When I look back at the girl who boarded that first flight to Sweden in November 2017, I see someone I barely recognize. A year later after visiting every country in Europe, I was standing in Dubrovnik and I truly was a different person. I had traveled alone, cried alone, made friends, taken risks, and discovered that I was capable of far more than I had ever believed. And more importantly, I had stopped waiting for my life to change and started changing it myself. At 37, after years of feeling stuck and unsure of what I wanted, I finally knew. I wanted a bigger life. I wanted to keep going. For the first time, I trusted myself enough to do it.
And now was the time to do it.
The Trip That Changed the Course of My Future
This is probably the easiest trip to write about. Not because it’s the most recent, but because for the first time in my life everything fell into place in the most unimaginable way.
It was early November 2018, and at this point I had spent nearly a year travelling around Europe with one final trip to go to complete my travel quest. A few days after my final trip was set to end in Croatia, I would be flying back to Boston to start my new job… in travel (funny how that works, right?).
(Flashback Moment: I had met someone when I was travelling, we connected at Logan Airport over a beer, exchanged IG profiles, he reached out months later to tell me the company he worked for was hiring and asked if I was interested. Went on an interview, job was secured and I would be starting the next month.)
This final trip to Europe was both an ending and a beginning. I was closing the door on the most transformative year of my adult life, and heading home to a new job, a fresh start, and a life I thought I had finally figured out. I was excited for so many reasons, but I knew deep down that this last trip was going to be something special. I would be visiting a friend in Germany (one I made when I was 20!) then travelling to Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia and Croatia – and finally staying at one of my dream hotels for one last hurrah – the Aman Sveti Stefan.
Because I planned this final trip so far in advance with my goal’s end date in mind, I had a small scheduling conflict which meant I had an extra day before I would be staying with my friends in Germany to celebrate Carnival in Cologne. Inconvenience then turned to opportunity, and I decided to pop up to Oslo to visit a friend before heading back down to Germany.
After a boozy night in Norway that made me regret my morning flight to Cologne, I was back in Germany before I knew it, back to where it all started so many years ago. In a moment that could only be described as full circle – from an unsure, nervous 15-year-old staring up at the Cologne Cathedral, to a confident, steadfast 37-year-old ready to take on the world, I had somehow magically found myself in the same spot I’d stood 21 years earlier.
Fast forward a few beautiful weeks along the Balkan Coast – ranging from an insane public bus ride from Tirana to Podgorica to my outstanding stay at the Aman in Montenegro, where I was literally the only guest!! to being invited to a family party in Bosnia – I was finally ready to get back to Boston. I had a new life waiting for me and only an airport layover in Munich standing in my way.
As I cozied up in the airport lounge with a glass of wine, I started flipping through Tinder. I mean, why not, I had time to kill after all… and that’s when I swiped right. A quick hello to my new match and then I was in airplane mode on the flight back to Boston.
After landing in Boston and a few (let’s be honest, a lot of) messages later, I found out my Tinder account geotagged me when I was in Norway a few weeks prior, and my new match was living in Oslo, thousands of miles away from where I was. What started out as daily chatting turned into hour-long conversations and then eventually became more serious when we decided after two months that we should finally meet in person.
A flight was booked and a few days later, I was on yet another airplane crossing the Atlantic on a trip that once again had the opportunity to change the course of my life. I can still remember the anticipation in my body as I landed at Gardermoen and hopped on the express train to Oslo S.
I knew something was different about this guy, about this trip – but all of those insecurities came back and the what ifs came flooding in. I mean, I have seen enough seasons of 90 Day Fiancé to know that in person means something very different than online. Online, and across the ocean, you can be someone else – you can be confident, vulnerable, and express your true feelings and desires for the future, but in person there is no screen to hide behind or shut things down with the click of a button when things get uncomfortable.
As I got off that train at Oslo S, somewhere between that platform and the airport – the premise of the rest of my life – everything changed. This was it. Everything that I had done for myself, everything that I had been through over the past years, had led me here. Had I not gotten on those planes when I was 15, 20, 36 and now 37, I wouldn’t have been standing on that train platform, about to meet someone who would completely change the course of my life. More importantly, I wouldn’t have been standing there as the person I had finally become so fucking proud of being.
And then, all around me, somehow the life I had never planned for started falling into place.
After a year of back and forth between Boston and Oslo, a new idea started forming. The job I had gotten during the course of my travels just so happened to have an office in Oslo (funny how that worked out!) and after a massive amount of paperwork, a move during COVID, and countless hours of stress and anxiety, I landed back in Europe with my life packed up in 5 suitcases along side my beloved English Bulldog Ruby (RIP) but this time I finally knew I was home.
You never know what a trip will become before you take it. When I was 15 and got on that airplane for the first time, I felt like I belonged where I was. When I was 20, I couldn’t stop what I had started.
When I was 36, I restarted my life and realized I could do this alone. And one year later, I finally understood that maybe I wasn’t just meant to just visit these places. Maybe I was meant to build my life there. And I did.
Happy endings aren’t only for fairytales – they exist for those who dare to explore and those who dream of something else.
Cheers to the girl who stepped off that plane in Germany and thought, I belong here – and then eventually built her life in Europe, decades later.
conquering continents 