Europe, and the road to Istanbul

A few months at home in Texas was enough to remind me I wasn't finished. In January 2016 I flew to Germany, and the trip changed shape completely — no more dust and diesel exhaust, no more sweating through a shirt by 9 a.m. Now it was overland through the middle of a European winter: Germany down through Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, all the way to Istanbul, then back up through Germany again to close the loop.

If Central America was heat, noise, and constant human contact — hostel hosts, fellow travelers, strangers waving me onto buses — this leg was the opposite. Long train rides through gray countryside. Border crossings where nobody was trying to sell me anything. Cities that felt like they'd been standing exactly like that for five hundred years and would keep doing it long after I left.

I remember standing on a summit like the one at the top of this page, alone, hands on hips, and doing the math on how far I'd actually come — not in miles, though that number was getting absurd too, but in what I'd let myself believe was possible for my life. A year earlier I was still deciding whether to quit a stable government job. Now I was standing alone on a mountain in a country where I didn't speak the language, having crossed most of a continent by land, and none of it felt like it was happening to someone else. It felt like mine.

Istanbul was as far east as this particular loop went — the bridge between Europe and Asia, literally, a city split by a strait — and then I turned around and rode it back to Germany the way I'd come. I didn't linger. By late February 2016 I was flying back toward the US, and from there, almost immediately, on to Cambodia. The trip was picking up speed. I didn't know yet that the next stop was going to matter more than almost anywhere else on the map.