One of the things that always cracks me up about tropical islands it the fact that it never fails that you will, at one point or another, see some beach bum who has lived on the island for the last twenty years making his living walking up and down the beach with a metal detector. In fact, it’s so fascinating that I’ve made a point to talk to almost every single one of these guys I’ve ever seen and the conversation is always just as similar as their eerily glistening, hairy and over tanned bellies. These guys will talk at length about how they make their entire living off of metal they pull out of the sand but will never pull up anything more than a soda pop tab while you’re walking and talking. I’m not sure what kind of diamond rings they’re pulling up when I’m not around but even in a place with a fairly low cost of living (like, say, Arkansas) you’d think it would be tough to live off of soda pop tabs.

I takes a while to learn how to travel the world. At first, you’ll make dumb mistakes all the time. You’ll forget your passport, you’ll forget to lock your hotel door, you’ll make friends with shady people who are bad influences or worse, you’ll get sick, you’ll get lost, and you’ll get depressed and lonely and exhausted. With time, however, you’ll learn how to take care of yourself, take care of your possessions, and take care of your sanity. One of the main keys to this is giving yourself permission to chill out and not do anything, even for days on end. This is much easier to do when you are traveling for a long period of time, but it’s also necessary when you are going for just a short while. This is especially important if you are traveling with another person, because let’s face it: we humans need space in order to get our heads straight and to stay calm and happy!

All of my best travel stories have one thing in common. Me being completely out of my element in a country I know little to nothing about where the language they speak might as well be Martian for all I know. There’s nothing quite like being surrounded by a sea of perceived chaos and having to force yourself to lay back, relax and go with the flow. I’ll never forget wandering into a random cheese shop in the middle of Nowhere-in-particular, France and spending the next half hour trying to act out in a complicated display of charades exactly how much of which kind of cheese I’d like to buy. Especially complicated since how much of which kind was basically a completely arbitrary decision on my part since I knew absolutely nothing about what types of cheeses these might be or what they would taste like when I finally managed to get them out of the store and onto the dry baguette that was intended to serve as my lunch that afternoon. Eventually, however, I walked out with a smile on my face a spring in my step and stinky cheese on my baguette all the happier for having had the unusual experience.