People Talk to Me
The Europe Edition
Van life starts in a few weeks. One of my quieter fears underneath all the logistics (so many logistics!) has been wondering if I will get lonely. I know I won’t be dramatically, crushingly lonely — I have weekly calls with 3 different friends plus unscheduled contacts with other friends and family to help me stay connected. But I have worried about the low-grade kind of loneliness that comes from not having a home base, from moving through places without staying long enough to belong anywhere.
My accidental pilgrimage to Europe answered that fear in ways I hadn’t anticipated.
Over fourteen days, I learned that depth isn’t just about how long I stay someplace. It’s in the attention I bring to it.
And …
Apparently …
It’s also in the fact that strangers have been talking to me my whole life. In college, it got so bad that a friend got me a t-shirt that said The therapist is not in. It was a joke about how a different person sat next to me in biology lecture every single class period and just ... started sharing their lives. I didn’t do anything to invite it. I guess I just didn’t close myself off. Needless to say, I didn’t do very well in biology.
Why did I think Europe was going to be any different? From my mother, I’ve inherited the ability to connect with people from the grocery cashier to the bank teller to the person on the path whose dog comes up to me to say hello and who ends up telling me their whole story. Why should I worry that van life would be different?
Here’s a snapshot of some of the folks who found me in Europe.
Carmen — Philadelphia International Airport
I hadn’t even left the country yet.
I was standing in the boarding line at Philadelphia, backpack on, looking every bit the middle-aged woman about to do something slightly audacious. Carmen was in her late twenties, loaded down with a backpack of her own and a day pack on her front. She was between jobs, heading to Spain to walk part of the Camino de Santiago. She said it was the perfect way to end one chapter and start the next.
That resonated with me.
We talked for maybe five minutes, each recognizing a stranger in an airport line who also was about to launch themselves somewhere unknown. Two women, thirty years apart, both carrying everything we needed on our backs. Both heading toward something we couldn’t quite name yet.
When we landed in Madrid and she was confused about immigration, she sought me out. I’ll never know her real name. I’ll never see her again. But Carmen was the first person on this trip to remind me of something I keep re-learning: the best conversations happen when I’m unguarded and open to possibility.
Carmen was heading toward the Camino. And while I didn’t know it yet, I was also on my own accidental pilgrimage.
Marisol — Barcelona
A seven-minute cab ride. That’s all we had.
It started with language. I’ve been taking Spanish lessons, and I love to practice even though I’m humble about how much I still have to learn. Something about that humility opens doors. When I stumbled through a greeting, Marisol lit up. And in Spanish, before I’d even had my morning coffee, we covered language lessons, politics, power, war, and the role of Mary in Islam. She told me about her children in various SWANA countries and how she worried about them. I told her about my children and my worries.
In seven minutes, in a language I’m still learning, we connected as mothers and as human beings worried about our loved ones and hoping for a better future.
Seven minutes was all it took.
Fred — Paris
I met Fred because the Paris subway machines would. not. work. Maybe she heard me curse (repeatedly) in English. For whatever reason, she came over to help. But then neither of our cards would work, so we hung out in line together waiting for help. By the time I finally made it through the turnstiles, I knew we were going the same direction, so of course I waited for her and we chatted on the platform and in the train until our directions diverged.
Fred was in her late twenties, on her very first work trip to a conference on a big-deal aerospace engineering solution. We geeked out about mechanical versus electronic systems for a while. Then she told me that after the conference, she had some extra time, so she figured she’d take the subway to the Arc de Triomphe before hopping the train back to the UK. It was her first solo trip and she was a little bit nervous, but she told me about how she was approaching it like a game. Smart woman — gamifying her anxiety!
I told her about the first time I traveled alone for work. I had gotten stranded in Chicago in 1995, on my way to a Digital Libraries Conference in Austin, Texas. A few days later, in Austin, I got my first tattoo. She laughed and observed her trip had been a little less exciting, thank goodness.
There’s something that happens when two women recognize each other as safe and start navigating the world side by side for a while. It’s so lovely when that happens.
Elizabeth and Fraser — Also Paris
Elizabeth heard me say “Gracias, I mean Thank you, I mean, Merci!” at a café table near the Eiffel Tower and laughed. Not at me, but with me. And then we were off.
They were British and Scottish (I’ll let you guess which was which), and we talked about how your brain stores languages, how travel shakes loose old things you thought you’d forgotten, how humbling and hilarious it is to discover that your high school French is still in there somewhere, tangled up with the Spanish you just learned. Elizabeth told me that, in Arabic, even “How are you?” has appropriate genders and how she had learned that the hard way.
It was a brief but delightful conversation. A perfect little Venn diagram of shared absurdity.
Jenny and Matt — Eiffel Tower line, also Paris
Newlyweds from Minneapolis, and within minutes of meeting me, they were apologizing for their itinerary. Barcelona yesterday, Paris today, Lake Zurich next, then Italy.
“I know it’s a lot,” Jenny said, almost sheepishly.
I started laughing, because I had been doing the same thing at the start of the trip — feeling guilty about moving fast, about not being the slow contemplative traveler I usually am. And here was this young couple carrying the same unnecessary shame.
So I told them what I was still learning to tell myself: You are here. You are doing this. That is enough. Don’t apologize for showing up in beautiful places just because you can’t stay as long as someone else thinks you should.
I think they needed to hear it. I know I did.
Vicente and Mave — Top of the Eiffel Tower, still Paris
I didn’t have “look at a stranger’s vacation photos on Instagram while waiting for the elevator back down from the Eiffel Tower” on my bingo card. But there it was.
Vicente was from Brazil and had some of the most gorgeous travel photos I’ve ever seen, and he was eager to share them. He pulled out his phone and started scrolling: Edinburgh, London, Paris. And they were heading to Italy next. Beautifully composed, with incredible filters, these were the kind of photos that made my selfies look like I’d handed my phone to a golden retriever.
Mave was quieter, smiling as he narrated. There was something so lovely and pure about it: A man, so proud of the beauty he’d captured, so excited to show a stranger what the world looked like through his eyes. No pretension, no holding back. Just: Look at this. Isn’t it beautiful? Wasn’t I lucky to see this?
Yes, Vicente. Yes you were.
Abernathy — Heathrow, London
At 77, Abernathy decided he deserved priority seating and announced as much as he sat down beside me in the terminal. Within ninety seconds I knew he was a retired history professor specializing in World War I and II, heading to Oslo for a cruise, and deeply put out that his Royal Opera tickets had been for the wrong night.
He got a kick out of hearing I was in London for a punk concert.
“You should listen to Sibelius,” he told me. “The Second and the Fifth.”
He had to go get a seat assignment and then we went our separate ways. But when I boarded the plane and walked past his row, he looked up and said, “Glad to see you made it.”
It was not lost on me that I met a World War II historian heading to Norway on the exact day I was about to arrive in Bodø, Norway — a city bombed flat by the Germans in 1940. The universe, it turns out, has a very well-stocked casting department.
The Sibelius was lovely.
Zahra — Plane to Oslo
She couldn’t reach something under the seat in front of her because her big fuzzy jacket was taking up approximately all available space. So she asked if I could help. I did. Then she asked if I thought her coat would be warm enough for Oslo. And we were off.
Zahra is in her twenties, stunningly beautiful, heading to a ski resort for a conference. She had never been to Norway. She had never been downhill skiing. She was pretty sure it was downhill skiing. They mentioned a lift and some black slopes she should stay off of.
Her parents are originally from Nigeria and moved to Switzerland before she was born, then to the UK. She has both a UK and a Swiss passport and reported that the Swiss one is much easier for traveling in the EU.
The plane swayed a lot during at one point and she was nervous. She looked at me and I tried to project confidence. I told her to watch the flight attendants because if they were chatting away animatedly, nothing was wrong. They were. She relaxed.
Nigerian-Swiss-British. First ski trip. Nervous about flying but brave enough to do it all anyway. This beautiful, complicated, glorious world is so full of amazing people!
Emma — Bodø, Norway
Norwegians are private people. They respect your space. So it’s probably not surprising that the first person to talk to me above the Arctic Circle was a transplant from Ohio.
Emma was my waitress in Bodø on my first night in Norway. She asked where I was from. When I told her, she admitted she’d heard a bit of Midwestern in my accent. She was from Ohio.
How does a woman from Ohio end up waiting tables in Bodø, Norway? Four years of backpacking. She decided she needed to stop somewhere for a bit because, she told me, “I was having too much fun.” She has a Finnish passport through her dad, started looking at the Scandinavian job market, posted in a Norwegian job hunters Facebook group, and got an online interview with the restaurant in Bodø — a place she’d never been, never even heard of — and took the job sight unseen.
“It’s much more peaceful and calm here,” she said. “And much less diarrhea than India.” She highly recommended India despite the gastrointestinal issues.
She was a nomad who stopped. I’m a settler about to become a nomad. We met in a rebuilt city above the Arctic Circle, both of us far from the Midwest, both of us exactly where we were supposed to be.
“Have a nice life!” she said as I left.
“You too!” I said. And I meant it with my whole heart.
Marie and Herborg — Nidaros Cathedral, Trondheim, Norway
I’ll keep this brief here because I talked about the cathedral in a different post. But in sum: I walked into Nidaros — the northernmost medieval cathedral in the world, built over the grave of Saint Olav, under construction since 1070 — and found a kindergarten service in full swing. Children. A choir. A juggler. A woman in vestments leading the whole glorious, chaotic thing.
Chaplain Marie Farstad let me cry in her sanctuary when I told her how powerful it was to see a woman leading worship in a space like that. She understood without me having to explain the whole long arc of it.
Bishop Herborg Finnset walked me to the oldest part of the cathedral and told me that when they were rebuilding the rose window, they didn’t have complete plans. They didn’t know exactly how it had been done. But as they kept working, she said, the way revealed itself.
The way revealed itself as they worked on it.
I’m going to be thinking about that for a long time.
Judy — Mount Fløyen, Bergen, Norway
I was coming down the mountain from Fløyen, phone in hand, thinking exclusively about how much I wanted a nap. That’s when Judy asked if she could take my picture. I said no thank you and offered to take hers. She laughed. I laughed. And then we just started walking down together.
Judy was close to my age, British, curious, warm, the kind of person who will start a conversation with a stranger on a mountain and be down for whatever happens next. She and her husband don’t agree politically; they’ve made it work for decades by staying curious about each other and traveling separately. We talked about what’s happening in our respective countries, about beauty, about where you find it and why it matters right now. She told me about the famous Liverpool lamb bananas — a public art installation combining Liverpool’s exports of lamb and imports of bananas, because some sculptor decided the combination would be hilarious, and they were right. I’d never heard of lamb bananas in my life. Now I will tell everyone.
And then there was the small boy who had climbed up above a stone wall and looked a little stuck and a lot scared. I dropped my bag to help. Judy looked at me and flatly said: “This is going to take two of us.” Like we were taking on a prize fighter.
How could you not love someone who drops their bag to help you climb a wall to rescue a child?
(He was fine. He announced, with the dignity only a five-year-old can muster, that he was NOT afraid, actually. His family appeared. We were released from duty.)
I started that walk empty and exhausted. I ended it full and delighted.
Europe handed me Carmen before I’d even crossed the Atlantic, and Judy on a mountain I didn’t want to climb, and Emma who did in reverse exactly what I’m about to do. It handed me Abernathy and his Sibelius, Zahra and her fuzzy jacket, Vicente and his camera roll full of joy.
Europe resoundingly answered that quiet fear about van life loneliness for me. I don’t have to engineer connection. I just have to show up open and unhurried enough to notice when someone needs help reaching something under the seat, or when a stranger laughs at the right moment, or when two people are heading the same direction and might as well walk together.
I draw people like moths to a flame (though I sincerely hope I don’t burn them!) and while it is a curse on those days I just want to keep my head down and go about my business, it is also a delight and reminds me of all the beauty and wonder in the world and in my fellow humans.
Vanlife route planning is underway. I cannot wait to see who finds me next.
Delightful connections and thank you for invoking my only memory of high school French. A bonus question on exam. Monsieur Beckmann saying “Ecrivez le mot pour ‘Aqualung.’ N’ecrivez pas ‘Jethro Tull.’”
I love those small connections that can happen anywhere. They're memory makers that fill life with stories.