The Truth About Travel

So today I am going to tell you something about travel that most people will try to hide from you: Traveling can be stressful.

We have a misconception in our society today that all travel bloggers/adventurers/enthusiasts are on a constant vacation, and that things always go accordingly because, well, doesn’t it look that way on their Instagram photos?? But the truth is that things don’t always fall into place, you don’t always end up in the most glamorous hotels, the adventures aren’t always a 24/7 high, and life doesn’t always go the way you plan.

On a more personal note, I learned this truth the hard way. In the summer of 2016, my then-fiance, Adem, and I had been separated for 8 long months during a long process of getting him his fiance visa so that he could come to America and we could live happily ever after. Maybe not so short, but sweet and simple, right? Wrong!! This was, by far, the most hectic 8 months of my life, and I’d be lying if I said that things went smoothly. After nearing the end of the process, we ran into a couple of problems. So I decided, that week, to hop on a plane and reunite in Athens, Greece.

The first day back was heaven. We explored the city, saw the sights, ate the food, and even prepaid for a room so that we could continue our visa process the next day. It was such a relief to be with my man again, until…we ran into another obstacle.

At the end of the night, we stopped at a small sandwich shop and got some falafel. I was tired, I was hungry as hell, I was in such bliss to be reunited, and, I guess for the first time all day, I was off-guard. My purse was right beside me, and Adem was on my other side. We were laughing and talking up a storm, grateful to be together again. A man came up to us and asked us what time it was. Thinking nothing of it, we both looked at our phones, told him, chatted a bit, and he thanked us and left. Not ten minutes later, we started getting up to leave. I look down beside me. No purse.

I panic, but rationalize with myself, convincing myself that it has to be somewhere. I look under the bench we had been sitting on. I look behind the wall next to us. I look inside the store, asking people around, when a sudden horrifying realization sets in.

Guys, I got robbed in Athens.

Yes, I know. I was on guard all day. I was the overly paranoid tourist who held onto my belongings like my life depended on it. At one point during the day, I even explained to Adem that we needed to be careful about pick-pocketing. And then, it happened to me.

Let me tell you exactly why this was much worse than it sounds. Inside my purse was:

• My driver’s license
• My social security number
• My passport
• My fiance’s passport
• All of my debit /credit cards (the only money I had brought with me)

Everything may have been replaceable, but here is the catch: my fiance’s passport was from Albania, and we were in the middle of his visa process that had a very strict deadline. So unless we got him a new passport from Albania in time, he wasn’t coming to America with me.

The rest of that night was a blur between reporting the incident to the police, realizing they would do nothing about it, and wandering the streets of Athens, looking in dumpsters with the hopes that they had taken the small amount of cash I’d had and dumped the purse somewhere nearby. Needless to say, we did not find it.

My first day back in Greece with my fiance: awesome. My first night: not so good.

This is an extreme example of how bad things can get, but the whole point is that travel can be a challenge. I didn’t expect to get robbed my first night in Athens. I didn’t expect to take a trip to Albania (that actually ended up being a really fun trip) to get my fiance’s passport back. Sometimes, we can face so many unforeseen obstacles in our travels, that things may seem overwhelming. But these experiences are the ones that make great stories in the end.

I can now look back on all of this as a funny memory and an experience that really hit me hard, because I had always gone out into the world of travel with expectations. I played it over in my mind how perfectly everything would go, and life just had other plans. And honestly, that is the beautiful part about life. We can’t always plan out every little detail. And sometimes we are challenged beyond our limits, and it makes us realize that we can take on so much more than we ever thought possible. This experience may have severely complicated things for me at the time, but I learned so much about myself in the process.

The truth about travel is this: it’s never picture perfect like we make it look on Instagram. There are struggles. There are times that make us want to collapse from exhaustion. There are times when we’d hoped that things would have gone so much smoother. But these times teach us who we really are. And that’s what keeps us coming back for more: the unknown. Every step we take further into the unknown is one more step closer to discovering the fire within us all that drives us to travel. And so we will continue to do so, and embrace every unique experience that comes with it.