‘Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.’ -Rumi
When I arrived in Bali in early January 2017, I planned to spend five weeks exploring the island of the gods. Little did I know, but my experiences in Bali would change the course of the next year of my life, inspiring a last-minute decision to cancel my return ticket back to California.
After an unexpected plot twist set my departure back a day, I was eager to start my journey through Europe and Southeast Asia. My first destination? Paris. I hadn’t even left home yet, but the world of travel was already teaching me some valuable lessons. C’est la vie. Lesson #1 — Avoid flying on a budget airline. Lesson #2 — If ignoring lesson #1, triple check your departure time, especially when the budget airline you are flying on changed the departure time by shifting it forwards almost 12 hours in a cryptic email with departure times listed without AM or PM. Lesson #3 — When you have missed your budget airline flight to Europe and need to book a last minute flight because no refunds or rescheduling, airline miles are a girl’s best friend. So, how did it feel to embark on the trip of a lifetime, one that had been several years in the making and had taken countless hours of planning? It felt a little bit like the nervous excitement on your first …
I knew it was going to be an adventure the moment we left the all-night party. Our three backpacks were stuffed into the back of my Ford Escape, with blankets and pillows and other cozy necessities crammed into every possible space.
It seemed crazy to set off on a trip like this with practically zero sleep, and perhaps it was. But the southwest was singing and we heard its’ siren call.
Driving into the rising sun, the desert was beautiful in a palette nothing like the coastal hues we had left behind in California. Sienna, sage, ochre and rust dotted the sandscape in pastel swathes and splotches of color…
It was 3 AM at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and I was crawling over a rickety footbridge on my hands and knees, wearing a 30 pound backpack. The river below looked dark and uninviting, and Kate was barely visible ahead in the darkness, her headlamp a dim beacon. I could feel the thin boards flexing as I made my slow progress towards the safety of the riverbank on the other side…
Wild Compass 