When I was 16 I took a month-long trip to Italy with my grandparents. I saw a bunch of the Rome airport and Venice airport (it's actually called the Marco Polo airport, and I thought that was great!), but when we arrived in the town we were actually staying called Valdagno and within the first hour of being there I had been 'let out' for a walk and gotten carried away with the neat video camera I had (it was the 90s....) and subsequently gotten myself completely lost. The moment I realized this I do happen to remember very clearly because it felt like although I should have obviously kept it in mind the whole time I had not thought of it until about 20 mins after I was supposed to be back from my travels. Like it didn't even matter. Overwhelming advice after the fact was that I should have just looked backward at the video I shot, and perhaps I would have if I hadn't been found soon after. True story, my cousin Maurizio that I had never met before is the one who found me and I had just trusted that since he knew my name, he knew me, and went with him. If we were in Mexico? ya maybe not.
“When you're lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you've just wandered off the path, that you'll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it's time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don't even know from which direction the sun rises anymore.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert
