On Travel Friends and Travel

So I've made it to New York.

Not the city. The state. I'm here for five or so days, somewhere in suburbia.

It used to be that I traveled to the city once a year (sometimes twice) to hang with my good friends, travel buds, gals I picked up on the road who called Brooklyn and Manhattan home.

Now though, both are married, both are moms and both have left the urban congestion behind for the equally-maddening suburban kind.

It's a strange and glorious thing to visit travel buds on their home turf. It's perhaps even more of a strange and glorious thing to go into their now-established homes and eat meals with their husbands and kids.

Here are these women, my friends that I met while we were all off doing wild, adventurous things, and now they are (and I am too I suppose) settled and busy being adults, as opposed to busy becoming adults, which was what we were doing at the time of our meetings.

I was busy becoming an adult when I met Alison in Argentina.

And then Alison and I met Michelle in Peru.

And then Michelle and I traveled together through Guatemala.


And so it was that a series of Latin American jaunts brought these women, women I truly consider two of my soul mates, into my life.

What is it about people that you meet on the road? Since becoming a traveler, I've always marveled at how quickly bonds are formed on the move.

On this trip, I happened to ask Michelle what she thought it was that brought random travelers together.

"Vulnerability," she said. "It makes you hang on to people you don't know."

Lucky for me, I've been able to hang onto these friends longer than the trips on which I met them. It's been 10 (gulp) years now since I met them both.

Photos:

2008 - Celebrating our 10 year-reunion with calorie-packed, gourmet cookies in suburban New York.

1998 - Triumphant and tired after hiking four days to reach Machu Picchu. We really could have used those cookies way back then.