I was always obsessed with adventure. Which is exactly how I would eventually find my way to glorious Key West. But I wouldn’t figure that out for many years.

When I was 19 years old and filled with desire to unearth the meaning of life, I traveled around the world for six months by myself. While this sounds brave I never intended to travel alone. It would not have occurred to me to travel through foreign lands all by my lonesome.

When I flew out from NYC with my friend Gina and a couple of backpacks from the Salvation Army and a switchblade knife, we thought it would all be great fun and the goodbye party we threw for ourselves was riotous. When the backpacks rattled out on the luggage conveyor belt at Orly Airport their little metal legs were bent and all the straps were ripped off so that we could no longer wear them, but rather we had to drag them bumpily behind us like reluctant puppies. We should have heeded the omen.

Instead, over the next couple of weeks we alit here and there through Europe and all the way to some Greek island (not the one we bought a ferry ticket for so we were tossed off the boat at the first port of call) we left a steaming hideous trail of squabbles. We fought about absolutely everything. Every day was a tangle of disagreements and sometimes my switchblade knife looked like a tempting solution.

Thankfully Gina had a moped accident on this Greek island (I swear I did not push her). I stuffed her and her bloody knees into the surf to clean her gravel filled wounds, got her a bottle of wine to shut her the hell up, and made arrangements to ship her home.

We had been poised to head east, to the start of the truly mysterious destinations, like Sri Lanka, a country I had never even heard of but I was ecstatic to see Gina go.

Gina being gone was such a relief that loneliness never affected me. Rather, at times when I felt ‘alone’ for example locked into the youth hostel in Colombo during a spate of Martial Law, I suspected that for the first time in my life I was experiencing ‘freedom’, and I liked it.