In 2024, I had a number of planned trips, and a number of spontaneous(ish) trips. While I was originally going to write about them all individually, I’ve decided to wrap them all up in one post. This’ll be long…

Northeast Birthday Bash
These trips began, as they will end, with a birthday. Two birthdays, in this particular case: mine and Josh’s. I met Josh on the Mediterranean cruise from 2023, and we discovered that our birthdays are only a few days apart. He and I, along with two other friends from the cruise (David and Brandi), all went up to Josh’s place in Rhode Island. We ventured together down to NYC for a few days and some memorable moments, including a birthday burlesque brunch (with bottomless mimosas for three hours – we were sooooo drunk that day) and seeing The Book of Mormon on Broadway!

The Emotional Support Travel Companion Europe Trip
Only a few weeks after the previous trip, I flew with one of my oldest friends to Europe. She had asked me to accompany her on this trip as her emotional support person, as she was delivering some of her late husband’s ashes to his twin. At the same time, she wanted to explore as much as she could in the two weeks we were there, because it was her first time in Europe, and I was there, essentially, to make sure she was safe. She paid for the trip, and it was our first time traveling together. Over the two weeks, we spent a few days in London, took a train to Glasgow, flew to Oslo for a few days and an Aurora concert (that I ended up missing due to illness), then Edinburgh for a few days, back to Glasgow, then to London again. It was my first time to the UK, Scotland, and Norway. The trip was a mixed experience:

Good things: I loved London, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. (Sorry, I’m afraid I had only negative impressions of Oslo!) Ran around doing Good Omens themed touristy stuff, including accidentally finding myself in a spot that is filmed in the first season. The person we met in Scotland, who I’ll simple call A, became almost an instant friend, a soul-cousin, with whom I’m close to this day. I fell completely in love with Edinburgh. The second time in London, we stayed in Chiswick, and I fell in love with Chiswick too. I catalogued experiences for later fanfic settings, took a bajillion photos, and met some really good people.

Bad things: My friend’s phone was stolen on the first day and that set the tone for the rest of the trip. I was prepared to be a support person, but not for her to turn on me, essentially treating me as if I were to blame for everything that went wrong, from the phone thing to her running out of her pain meds in the second half of the trip because she took too many in the first half. This friend and I have known each other since we were teenagers, and I was unprepared for the indifference, resentment, and sly insults that began to come my way once we met up with A and I was no longer needed as much. Since she was grieving, I tried to give her that grace, but it’s hard when someone blames you for falling sick and thus being unable to attend a concert, and that sort of thing. I did everything I could to take care of her, medically (getting her a wheelchair in the airport because she was about to collapse, supporting her physically as she tried to walk, etc) and emotionally, but she was embarrassed to need me, and this trip marked the start of the dissolution of a friendship that was almost 30 years old.

Transatlantic Writing Trip
A month after getting home from Europe, Jason and I boarded a transatlantic cruise from Florida to London, stopping in the Azores, Ireland, near Stonehenge, and in Belgium. After the cruise finished, we spent another few days in London, during which time I met Rainstorm in person for the first time. We had been friends and beta-partners for about four months then, and they came up from Germany with their then-girlfriend to meet up with us. We dressed up in Good Omens cosplay and ran around London together, because of course we did. Heh. Beyond meeting a friend IRL, I catalogued the whole trip for a fanfic that I was writing based on the itinerary, saw so many cool things in all of my stops, and got to visit so much more in London that I hadn’t been able to do on the previous trip, including the British Museum, Sky Garden, the Tower Bridge, Berkeley Square, and a ton more of Chiswick that I hadn’t been able to actually visit last time. Plus a million more GO sites. It was a really brilliant trip over all! Also, it turns out that I really enjoy being on the ocean.

The One That Didn’t Happen
I got talked into a spontaneous Mediterranean cruise for August/Sept 2024 with my friend Brandi. I had everything booked and ready to go. A couple days before my flight, I went out shopping for a few wardrobe things for the trip. Everything was fine. The next day, I woke up with an extremely distended abdomen and sharp pain. One trip to the ER later, and it turned out that I had developed terminal ileitis. This sounds scarier than it is – basically, the terminal end of my small intestine had gotten inflamed – but it meant that I was stuck recovering from a severe internal condition for a week… long past when the cruise started. Unfortunately, it was too close to time to get any money back on the cruise itself. Expedia gave me the most ridiculous credit in the world (had to be spent within a year from booking, could only be to/from Barcelona on the same airline), but at least I got to spend that one on a trip in 2025!

Caribbean Cruise to Test the Waters
My friend Stephanie had never been on a cruise and she gets seasick on smaller boats, so we decided to do a tiny three-day trip near Florida to test out how well she’d hold up. The two of us have traveled together many time and we travel well together, so it was a good fit. Despite a bit of motion sickness, she ended up enjoying the trip a bunch. We had a lot of fun together, and I got to explore Bimini in the Bahamas – another new-to-me country! The trip was a good distraction, too, as my kitty Atticus had literally crossed the rainbow bridge the day before we flew to Florida. I’m really glad I wasn’t alone on this trip, because I dealt with a lot of those grieving feelings in the down moments, and Stephanie both comforted me and gave me space to process those emotions.

The Glasgow Birthday Trip
After meeting A in Glasgow and enjoying my time in Scotland, I made a decision to return to Glasgow in November when the flight costs were lower. As I said above, A had lost a twin (my former friend’s husband) the previous year, so their shared birthday is a hard day. A and I designed my trip to coincide with this difficult time, so I could be there in a support capacity as well as a vacation and visiting a friend. As the time got closer, I was nervous that our instant connection in March had been a one-time thing, and we’d end up spending an awkward week together. No. No, no, no. It was like we hadn’t spent any time apart. We started talking immediately and basically didn’t shut up the entire time. A took off most of the week, only had to work on one day, so we explored Glasgow and I fell in love with the city far more than I had in March. I also got to spend a lot more time chatting with Rainstorm in the evenings because we were only one hour apart rather than seven, and what was then slowly becoming a flirtatious relationship blossomed into full-on dating during that week. A and Rainstorm spoke a number of times too and got along brilliantly. It was lovely.

Honestly, the only negative was that the friend who introduced me and A back in March became very upset that I’d gone to Glasgow, despite knowing about it ahead of time, and ranted at A over a ton of messages using her late husband’s profile to do so because she doesn’t keep profiles of her own. !!! It was wildly inappropriate and emotionally damaging. Since that summer, when this friend said and did some very hurtful things to me, the two of us had only had tentative conversation that often grew volatile, at which point I’d back away again. I was already considering ending the friendship permanently when this happened, and she used this opportunity to block me from her late husband’s memorial page. Honestly, the use of her husband’s social media as a weapon was the last straw for me. I pulled away completely. I only tried once more, in Jan 2025, when she wrote me an “I’ll always love you” type email. I did respond, only to get a nasty return message that I ignored. She tried once again, sending me a happy birthday text, deadnaming me in the process (the text was literally right under the text where I asked her to use my chosen name).

Goodness – you can see why I originally intended to talk about all this travel separately! But at this point, I’d rather get it all off my plate. I could skip talking about it at all, but most of this blog is for my own record anyway, so this was a good compromise. Now, 2025 was also a huge travel year for me, but those will be individual posts. I hope.