Summer 2010 One random summer evening, my family friend Haley asked me to go to Germany with her the following week. Her mom, a longtime flight attendant, put us on the standby list for employees’ guests. Convincing my mom was easy—free flights, free accommodations—and off we went to visit Haley’s then-boyfriend Marco, a former foreign-exchange student at our high school. Teenage angst, over-plucked eyebrows, and all, I’ll never forget how relieved Haley was that I said yes (

Summer 2015 Summer between sophomore and junior year of college: probably  the best summer of my life. Around Christmas the year before, my best friend and fellow travel bug, Schyler, floated the idea of backpacking around Europe. And so the planning began. Our friend Sam joined in, and we built a few reunions into the trip—meeting up with Marta, our high school’s Spanish exchange student, in Barcelona, and my mom in Berlin before wrapping things up in Prague. We flew into At