-Get good gear. Our hyrdoflask, spf water shirts are life saving. Don’t forget to have a hiking dress with pockets, toilet paper, and never ever forget an emergency baguette.
-Enjoy the not picture perfect moments. Like when it’s raining and someone was nice enough to tell you the bus isn’t coming.
-Learn to sit long enough with just an espresso and good company.
-To feel how tiny you truly are as a human being compared to nature. Then feel the world is small because you just happen to find someone randomly in the Fontainblue you know from back home.
-Wear matching shirts in a highly touristy spot, so finding your partner is so much easier. Even though that wasn’t the original plan.
-Making a wish in every church you enter for the first time, because your mother told you it’s a thing to do.
-“French Tacos” are a fancy way of saying fat sandwich. They triple as three meals because it’s that overwhelming. Especially if you didn’t pack an emergency baguette.
-Saying you weren’t coming home with souvenirs but being a sucker for teddy bears at Mont Michel…and Valensole.
-Always coming home with another Guinguette cup to add to your collection.
-Making sure you are the one to give your friend’s kid the gift because you know it’s bragging rights. She has officially declared you the designated hand holder and are now referred to as her/she.
-Finding joy in reminiscing about the previous moments, while doing nothing with friends is exactly what you needed, and feeling homesick because when you left, you felt like you were leaving home.
-Whenever there is beach/lake/shore to make sure you always say, “look how blue the water is.”
-You can’t plan for all of the “hiccups” you may come across, like missing a bus and having to take an unmentionable price for a taxi cab….. or when the train staff goes on strike and you needed to take 3 trains to get to your friends. Being stuck in the tiniest town Pontorson and resorting to crawling under a bridge for shade while drinking apple juice and thankfully you learned to always have an emergency baguette.
-Coming out of Verdon Gorge stronger and with more mental grit than you had before. (driving manual with cliffs, climbing, don’t you dare ever back me into a corner because I will have no option but to succeed)
-Missing the lavender fields in Valensole because the heat wave made them bloom two weeks earlier, but finding out you are passing the Lavender Festival that’s the biggest in the region.
-Leave no path left untraveled because you just don’t know where it’s going to lead, like a secret beach.
-To always wanting to go on vacation with my hair in braids, but freaking out that it took two hours to unbraid and the amount of hair loss I swear I was going to wake up with a bald spot.
-You can get to a point where you are done taking photos.
-Literally saying this is crazy everyday because the 8/9 months of planning is no longer a screen in front of you, but before your eyes.
-Always journal. It’s a thing I do every trip and I do every day. It makes passing time great at the airport reading about your previous trips. Like how would you remember the girl riding the scooter and being pulled over by a cop to receive a ticket. Or when eating at the park a cat comes out from the bush running towards you because it heard plastic being opened. Or when you thank god you weren’t the one that got shitted on from seagulls.
What I’ve Boiled Down To:
Even while showing the pictures to my grandma, it just doesn’t quite measure up. Pictures, stories, moments, and feelings are still lost. Even the photos I’m choosing to share are lost in translation. As much as these pictures are worth, they don’t do justice to what was before our eyes. These pictures only show a spec of the grand scheme of things. Every day my breath was taken away from the shear magnitude that this trip brought to me and my husband.
Nothing will compare from doing research behind a screen than seeing it in the flesh and with your own eyes. I don’t know if we will ever have a trip quite the same, but I look forward to trying to chase that feeling we got from it.
We’ve learned so much more than the bullet points posted previously. We learned to go with a plan, an idea of where to go, and what we wanted to see. Then how to handle spontaneity when plans fall apart. We had to lean on others in those times of friends and strangers. We received the pleasure of being welcomed into somebody else’s house, being shown kindness, and what it meant to live here (wherever we were). To show gratitude because we were the foreigners, not the other way around. To extend the golden rule of respect because that’s how you wish to be treated. If you put forth that air into the atmosphere you will be met with good karma.
To enjoy all of the small moments, because no matter what, time will never stand still even if you ask politely.
Capsule Customs Travel 