Day 9/Indie Travel Art Project: What is the best experience you've ever had while traveling?

It’s week two of Bootsn All Travel’s 30-day Indie Travel Art Project #indie30. If you are curious about it, check out the link at the end of this post. Today the theme is a “best” experience.

Being a person who adores travel in all forms with the exception of the trip I mentioned in yesterday’s post, this is almost Impossible to answer. I mean, jeez, was it

• Being in Russia and Ukraine in the summer of 1989 (during perestroika and glastnost, 4 months before the Berlin Wall met it’s fate) on a teenage peace mission;
• Rock climbing to explore the ancient dwellings in Cappadocia, Turkey with friends, without ropes;
• Staying out all night listening to samba and jazz, dancing in the streets in Rio de Janiero’s Lapa district, relaxing on the beach in Ipanema by day;
• Camping with the locals on various Carribean Islands;
• Riding a bike throughout Lucca, Italy, following the instructions of my Grandmother, mapping out the childhood and teenage year’s of my great-grandfather in his hometown.

Ok, ok. As I get ready to spend my honeymoon in Paris, I think THIS was the best experience: That late September evening along the Seine in Paris with a native Parisian gentleman, Nait. I don’t speak French, he didn’t speak English, so we enacted scenes from the French Conversation portion of my Lonely Planet Paris Encounter guide while we spied on the goings-on inside the docked houseboats. It was the perfect combination of isolation and comfort, strangers and friends, crazy and hilarious, dangerous and romantic, and lost and found, that tend to define the end-to-end journey of any given trip.

More about week 2 of Bootsn All Travel’s 30-day Indie Travel Art Project here.