Into The Wild: Your First Trip Together

by John Meils

First we considered Latin America. We’d see Mayan ruins, hike in places where the banditos weren’t, maybe ride a river in the rainforest. But it’d be August and insanely hot. Then it was Asia. Lorri had lived in Vietnam and Laos after college and still had friends there. We could flop on the cheap, but it’d also be kind of a reunion tour for her. Briefly it was Russia, but doing it right meant spending the entire vacation there and a whole month off felt too precious to blow in one country.

We settled on Eastern Europe: Romania to Hungary to Austria and finally the Czech Republic. We planned to fly in and out and do the rest by rail or bus or whatever—we’d figure it out when we got there. Separately, we’d both traveled a lot so it went unspoken that the trip would also be a litmus test for our relationship. Most of our year-plus together had happened long distance. We’d never killed hours in an airport side-by-side, never fought and had nowhere else to go, never seen each other in the same underwear for three days straight.