What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

by Kristin Newman

I began to need my trips like other people need religion.

You venture to the places where the tourists aren’t, in addition to hitting the “must-sees.” If you are exclusively visiting places where busloads of Chinese are following a woman with a flag and a bullhorn, you’re not doing it.

just be aware to show the culturally correct amount of booty.

you are able to go with the flow in a spontaneous, non-uptight way if you stumble into something amazing that will bump some plan off the day’s schedule.

My biggest travel suggestion

(He would show me pictures that he had taken from the deck of his naval ship of bombs blowing up gorgeous South Pacific beaches, and simply comment, “Look at that beautiful beach.”)

“Another Juan bites the dust,” Joe the bitter Brit would say. “He just wasn’t the Juan for me,” I’d conclude.

This book has kept me laughing

We sat over the river, and talked about how the river had become something unique and amazing just by cruising along on its path. How even if your life seemed quiet and typical, you never knew if around the next bend you were about to become something spectacular.

I realized they didn’t look at travel the way I looked at it, like medicine, like my chance to right all of the wrongs that might exist in my life.

It was the kind of travel chemistry that doesn’t happen all the time, and it all happened because I lost my passport and my plan.

Maybe the Argentina magic happened as a result of throwing myself with abandon into a place that was unknown, and I could find the magic again somewhere new.

My new bases involved not which part of your body was being touched with what, but where geographically the physical intimacy was taking place. So anything that happened in public, say in a car or on a front porch, was first base, anything that happened inside one’s house, on one’s couch/kitchen counter/dining-room floor, was second, move into the bedroom and you’re at third, sleep over and that’s a home run. The system is meaningful, I think, because instead of giving away parts of your body like oranges at mile markers in a marathon, intimacy progresses based on how far into your house and life you want to let your partner get.

that I need to travel to keep from dying of boredom from my own internal monologue.

down. I was the Little Engine Who Could Ignore Massive Red Flags.

I want to have been on all seven continents with you.”

Love language