When I was 19 I made some decisions. One of them was to stop eating meat. One of them was to stop using cutlery. One of them was to stop using chairs.

Before you tell me this is a certain type of person, I assure you I was the only type of person making these types of decisions as far as I knew.

I was in college and the summer was fast approaching. A summer where we had to leave campus for 2 months and figure out some other place to exist meanwhile.

I hadn’t figured out any place to exist meanwhile. Instead I went to grab a meal at the campus dining hall. And that’s where I met my new friend.

She sat alone when I came in. I felt like meeting new people so asked to join her. We had fun chatting. I asked her about her summer plans. She had none. I told her how cool I thought it would be to go backpacking across Europe without any plan or budget. She agreed.

We decided on the spot to go together. Two weeks later.

And so we did.

Our parents saw us off at the station. I suspect they exchanged numbers. I suspect they knew we didn’t know each other at all. I suspect they might have bonded on having the type of daughter who makes these types of decisions.

Me and my friend had bought an Interrail railpass for all of Europe for 3 weeks. That meant we could take any train in almost any country for “free” (well, we had already paid the one-time fixed price. It was very little).

Neither of us had a lot of money. We set a budget of 10 euros a day. For everything: Food and lodgings and any emergency item we may have needed. We tucked some cash in our socks, our bras, and in our actual wallets. We didn’t have smartphones. No one did back then.

I can’t remember the exact order of countries we passed through but here is some of what happened.

We made our way to Slovakia cause it was the cheapest place to go into the mountains. We found some far off tiny town where we could sleep for a few euros and a bakery was open for 3 hours a day. It was beautiful there. We asked our host about hiking. I had never hiked before. I had never even seen a mountain before. He said there was an easy route that took 4 hours and an intermediate one that took 6. We picked the latter. He warned us to always talk and otherwise sing, cause there were bears in that region and that’s how you scare them off. We laughed.

We found the start of the trail. It was beautiful. After awhile it was hard to understand where we were but it was still beautiful. I don’t know at what point we realized we were lost but that part was also beautiful.

At one point we walked along the edge of a ridge purely cause we saw a tiny house one mountain over. The path we took just kind of … petered out? Stopped existing? And there was a long drop down on one side. We struggled through cause what else could we do?

Once we got to the house, it was abandoned. There was an outhouse next to it and I really needed to go.

When I opened it, I was hit by a solid wall of flies. It was gross. There were so many. If they could all coalesce into one massive living creature, I think they would have. I got coated in them.

I ran. Screaming. My friend laughed. Neither of us pooped. We decided to try for the next place.

So we kept walking and there never came any next place. Eventually we got hungry cause we had not brought enough food. And at some point I did actually really have to poop.

So I squatted on the side of the mountain.

Dear reader, I had never gone in the wild before. I had never seen a mountain before that day, let alone gone camping at all.

But even though I had run out of food, I had brought … toilet paper. I wasn’t sure what else to do. So I wiped with paper and … left. it. there? I was giggling.

But that wasn’t my biggest problem. My biggest problem was getting up.

We had been walking for 8 hours, and I was not actually an athlete or an experienced hiker. My legs gave out as I tried to get up from a squat, and then rolled down the mountain.

I didn’t hurt myself. Somehow. I got up. Somehow.

My friend caught up with me and we continued down the path. We had decided to just take any path down the mountain cause we hoped we’d find roads in the valleys and would then just follow those roads till we found a house.

By that point we reached a very dark forest, cause, in part … it was actually just getting dark. We had been walking for 12 hours by that point.

We didn’t have a flashlight with us cause we were 19 and naive. Our parents were right to worry.

We did remember our host’s warning and so we started singing. Except we were so tired and so manic by then that we sang silly songs about getting mauled by bears while giggling all the way. Honestly, it was a good coping strategy. Neither of us was in charge of a pair of legs that really wanted to work anymore and we were both at risk of spraining an ankle or breaking a leg in the dark.

Finally we did make it to a road, and there was a building. And the people living there didn’t speak a word of English and we didn’t speak a word of Slovakian. But they had a phone, and we called a taxi, and we used some of our stash of cash to make it back to our lodgings.

And that’s when a funnier crisis started.

For 3 days, neither of us could walk cause our legs were so fucking sore. It was excruciating. But we did have to get food. We chugged some painkillers and then crawled to town, only to collapse in bed again straight after, giggling like manic idiots all over again.

It was amazing.

And that was not our only adventure.

There was also the time we decided we’d like to try to get into Serbia. Which was a warzone. Recounting all this, I honestly hope my daughters have more sense than I had at the time. But at the same time … I still get it. We wanted to feel alive. To see life. To experience adventure.

And so we took every possible train we could find that basically skirted the border of Serbia as we tried to find a way in.

We didn’t find a way in.

We kind of gave up by the time we got to the southern tip of Croatia. Which, to be frank, was gorgeous. We had no idea Croatia was so gorgeous. It looks like you imagine Greece would look, but it’s cheaper (or was at the time).

The part that was not idyllic was that by that point we had acquired a stalker who had followed us across three countries. The first time we encountered him, we were young and naive and told him our travel plans and our life stories, cause this was clearly smart and street-wise of us.

Then he showed up at every single stop we made and tried more and more to convince us to sleep over at his place, to sleep over at a friend’s place, that he knew a lot of girls like us who go backpacking and he could introduce us to those other girls that ? live ? at ? his ? place ?

By the time he approached us in idyllic Croatian town number 4, I discovered that, even though I have been conflict-avoidant and mild-mannered all my life, something about actual physical danger and some primal sense of social dynamics, made me walk up to the guy, straighten my spine, stare him in the eye, and tell him in no uncertain terms that if I saw him again a single time at any of our stops, I would go straight to the fucking police. Fuck you very much.

We didn’t see him again after that.

Phew.

So back to train life. We didn’t make it into Serbia. That was probably for the best. We were in our third week by then. Had travelled through 20 different countries, mostly walking around and looking at the sights and having a grand time. But we were hoping to visit a friend in Budapest in Hungary except …

We were already in Budapest, Hungary, while our friend would only arrive at her home in [checks calendar] three days …

Budapest now was … kinda of expensive for us. We only had our 10 euro budget, remember?

Initially we had a dumb plan: Sleep in a McDonalds.

Dear reader, you can’t sleep in a McDonalds. People tend to notice. Instead we stayed up till 4am in a McDonalds and then got, very politely, kicked out. We made our way to the station, where the first train would leave at 6am. This is where I discovered I was unusually bad at tanking sleep deprivation. I became pretty violently ill, couldn’t read the signage anymore, and nodded off on a bench. My friend meanwhile seemed mostly unaffected. She grabbed my hand and dragged me into a train. A train we had picked a few hours before cause it had one amazing property: It was the longest continuous train ride we could take for free! So we could, you know, sleep.

That’s how we ended up in Krakow. I’m so thankful I slept. It was a little strange though, cause it was a train with all those little booths, and though we started with our own private little booth, by the time I woke up, I had my feet tucked under a stranger’s butt. Apparently he had decided to sit down on the same bench as me, and apparently my feet were cold, and apparently getting a young girl’s frigid feet shoved under his ass did not motivate him to move.

He left at the next stop and me and my friend couldn’t stop giggling.

And then, Krakow was amazing and magical!

Now the sleep deprivation must have scrambled my memories around this bit. I both remember getting kicked out of a McDonalds at 4am in Budapest and falling asleep at the station and taking a 6am train, and I remember picking the longest possible night train from Budapest, which ended up arriving in Krakow at 6am. I think both events happened, and both happened on different days, but sleep deprivation will send history to oblivion, so I can’t be certain.

Anyway, so according to my memory we arrived at 6 am despite also taking a train at 6am.

Krakow at 6am was the most medieval experience of my life. If you ever played the Witcher, that’s what Krakow looked like. And then in the early morning, it was shrouded in mist, and there was a big central square which was, I shit you not, covered in ravens. It was so medieval.

We ate yoghurt with our hands while sitting on a curb. Roamed the town. Then took a night train back to finally meet our friend.

Our friend turned out to be posh. It was my first time getting a massage shower. I mean ever. For that week it was probably my first shower at all.

We made it back to the Netherlands on schedule and in one piece.

Was this a good way to travel?

Probably not.

Was it a good way to feel alive and go on adventures?

Fuck yeah <3