Would You Travel With Someone You Only Met Once?

I met Bridget this summer in Montenegro.

I’d been sick and stuck in Kotor for days. The hostel offered dinners for a price; however, I’d been too sick for the meal but hungry for the company. I drank water while everyone else drank beer.

Sitting next to me was a pretty Aussie girl with long hair and a loose laugh who was traveling with her then-fiancé. We fell into conversation, as you do with whoever is closest at these sort of grab-bag gatherings. But somehow we quickly got off the tired hostel-conversation track (where are you from, where are you going) and instead talked and talked and talked about journalism and writing and politics and tabloids and art and who knows what else. I was impressed that she’d met Julian Assange in his pre-WikiLeaks days (and she confirmed my assumption that he’s a real jerk) and worked for an actual magazine in Australia. I don’t know what drew her to me– I was stuffed-up sick at the time– but we exchanged contact information and promised to stay in touch. The next day she left Kotor and I stayed, still sick in bed.

And that very well could have been that.

But it wasn’t, of course.

Bridget wrote me a letter in the fall, during a madly stressful time. I love writing and receiving letters and this unsolicited one was particularly special. It came in the middle of one of those gray Istanbul days when the weight of the city was sitting heavy on my shoulders, when the blues of the place were wearing me down. After catching me up on her life and her experiences living, at the time, in small-town England, she said this little thing:

“I just wanted to remind you that you’re living a great existence right now!”

And I was overwhelmed with gratitude.

Sometimes, it’s nice to have a reminder that even during the stressful times, living in Istanbul is exceptional.

Bridget and I only stayed in sporadic touch, so it was a surprise when she wrote to me to ask if I’d be willing to travel with her in March. She was living in Cyprus and her husband would be in Afghanistan for six weeks; she wanted to have an adventure, a distraction.

What would you do? I’d met Bridget once. Perhaps it would be most normal to decline, to be cautious, to worry.

I rarely do things normally. I said yes.

Since I was limited by work and money, we based our adventure around Turkey– Bridget would come to Istanbul, and then we’d take a weekend in the central Anatolian city of Konya. We made our plans and booked our tickets via Facebook chat.

Maybe this seems like madness. But there’s something to be said for trusting your gut— I had a sense that this would be a good decision, and even if it wasn’t, a lost weekend with a near-stranger would at least provide a good story.

A few weeks later, Bridget arrived in Istanbul and any lingering uncertainty was quickly dispelled. The connection we’d had in Montenegro was still there. We laughed, we drank beer and ate blood oranges and decided to book our hotel upon arriving in Konya the next night– a level of spontaneity that can always backfire but that I appreciated.

These were good signs.

But the ultimate test of our travel compatibility came the next night, when we missed our flight.

This minor catastrophe was purely of our doing. We spent too long chatting in a cafe after check-in and before security. We stupidly jumped in the international departures line instead of the domestic one. No one– including the guy who signs off on all the plane tickets– noticed that we were in completely the wrong place.

The flight was already gone by the time we reached our gate.

We had to buy a new ticket for the next morning. We had to track down the bag Bridget checked. We were exhausted.

And yet, we laughed.

At one point during the bag-hunting-odyssey portion of the evening, as we ran through deserted hallways at Sabiha Gokcen Airport and encountered disinterested and monolingual airport employees, I turned to Bridget and pointed out how lucky we were that we weren’t ready to kill each other; that we were, in a warped way, having fun. We picked up a bottle of wine on the way back to my apartment and went off to Konya the next morning.

If there was ever a sign that we would be good travel buddies, it was this whole airport escapade. Nothing that happened in Konya could stress us out after missing our flight, and the weekend was filled over and over with laughter.

Every situation, every person, is different. You have to trust your instincts. Would you travel with someone you’d only met once, with that girl in your summer hostel who made you laugh and wrote you letters?

Maybe you wouldn’t… but I’m so glad I did.