Hello. My name is Erika and I am a Travel Addict.

I’m going to keep where this picture was taken a secret because the location is not important. What is important is the dynamics in this picture: Erin, my best friend, on my left and the plane we are about to board in the background. That’s how I would define my life: always boarding the next plane with my other pea from the pod by my side. I can’t think of any other way to exist. Whether it be back-packing through Europe by ourselves, hitching it through the Old West in an RV, or boating around Alaska, Erin and I live/eat/breathe/shit/cry/bleed/laugh/fart traveling. But how can anyone blame us? Shortly after Erin and I became friends in the first grade, she and her parents moved to Japan, and my parents and I moved to England. We were so young, we didn’t keep in contact. It wasn’t until the first day of eighth grade we were reunited by some weird twist of fate. We discovered that we’d both moved back to the same city within weeks of each other (and we discovered we had very little in common with anyone else). From then on, we were conjoined. We dreamed big dreams of continuing to travel the world. We shared stories from our own experiences being submersed in non-American culture. We’d save money like it was our job, only to blow it all on fancy dresses in France, gold and leather in Italy, and good beer in Dublin. The airport is our neighborhood, the other travelers our neighbors. We’ve schemed people, bartered with merchants, and danced with strangers in the streets. We’ve sampled the local cuisine only to vomit hours later. We’ve learned bits and pieces of at least 7 languages so we can ask for directions, go to the bathroom, and order a round of drinks for our new friends at the bar. Wherever we go, it is our objective to make new friends and to give a better impression of Americans. We take loads of pictures, but they can never really bring you close enough to what was actually going on at the time.

The location of this picture is irrelevant. What’s happening in this picture happens a lot. We’re damn lucky.

So I’m on the last leg of my backpacking trip through Europe, and I have parted ways with my friends who are all flying on different airlines in different countries because that is the way things work out. My country of departure was Spain, which is really sad because that is a country I don’t like to leave. All by my lonesome, I have time to kill in Madrid before my flight, so I wander the shops and streets, looking for something to keep my spirits up. Allow me to say that ending a trip is usually quite depressing for me. For one, it means back to reality, back to where I stress about the odds and ends of my life, where mornings more often than not are met with 4+ espresso shots and a panic attack because I don’t know where my life is going. But also, I really hate long plane rides, so I know I’m just going to have to pop some Valium and be incoherent for a day or two while I recover, and I just hate that. Anyway, I’m trudging along, listening to random Spanish conversations that I hear, picking up every other word and inferring the rest in my brain, when I stop at this bar. Yes, a bar. Mid-day, no less. Hell with it, I say, and I decide to have a drink. I order the cheapest thing on the menu in the smallest size it comes in and it is still like, I dunno, $10 in the states or something like that. The waiter brings me this tiny little glass with a drop or two of wine in it. I was at first a little perturbed; I ordered a glass of wine, not a teaspoon, dammit. But I relented instead of protesting and just drank the damn thing. And you know what? It changed my whole outlook on life. In that moment, I had a mini-epiphany: I felt like the glass represented my life, in the sense that it sure as hell was not what I thought I was getting, and I was genuinely pissed about it for a while. But then the wine in the glass was so amazing, even if it was cheap, even if is was a piddly little amount. I appreciated it. I was happy with what I had. And I stopped being pissed, and just enjoyed my wine…in Spain…after a month of backpacking in Europe with my three best friends. Ok, so life isn’t so bad.

There we are, a couple of Americans trying desperately to blend in and not look like tourists, yet failing quite miserably at this point because it is obvious to the masses that none of us know what our next move should be. Problems arise.

“When is the next train? Should we go wait for it?”

“Where was that one glass shop?”

“I’m hungry. Again.”

“I can’t read that sign.”
“*That’s because it is in Italian.”

“The map is still soggy.”

“I’m really sweating.”

And then a decision was made:

“Fuck it, let’s just go get gelato.”

But seriously! Is it not?

Hello. My name is Erika and I am a Travel Addict.

I’m going to keep where this picture was taken a secret because the location is not important. What is important is the dynamics in this picture: Erin, my best friend, on my left and the plane we are about to board in the background. That’s how I would define my life: always boarding the next plane with my other pea from the pod by my side. I can’t think of any other way to exist. Whether it be back-packing through Europe by ourselves, hitching it through the Old West in an RV, or boating around Alaska, Erin and I live/eat/breathe/shit/cry/bleed/laugh/fart traveling. But how can anyone blame us? Shortly after Erin and I became friends in the first grade, she and her parents moved to Japan, and my parents and I moved to England. We were so young, we didn’t keep in contact. It wasn’t until the first day of eighth grade we were reunited by some weird twist of fate. We discovered that we’d both moved back to the same city within weeks of each other (and we discovered we had very little in common with anyone else). From then on, we were conjoined. We dreamed big dreams of continuing to travel the world. We shared stories from our own experiences being submersed in non-American culture. We’d save money like it was our job, only to blow it all on fancy dresses in France, gold and leather in Italy, and good beer in Dublin. The airport is our neighborhood, the other travelers our neighbors. We’ve schemed people, bartered with merchants, and danced with strangers in the streets. We’ve sampled the local cuisine only to vomit hours later. We’ve learned bits and pieces of at least 7 languages so we can ask for directions, go to the bathroom, and order a round of drinks for our new friends at the bar. Wherever we go, it is our objective to make new friends and to give a better impression of Americans. We take loads of pictures, but they can never really bring you close enough to what was actually going on at the time.

The location of this picture is irrelevant. What’s happening in this picture happens a lot. We’re damn lucky.