This was the alley that was right by the youth hostel I stayed at a few years ago.

I’d taken the Pacific Coast Starlight train up from L.A. and the plan was to make it to Seattle. When I got off the train the first night, I was in San Francisco and it was midnight…all the hotels were booked so I stayed at a youth hostel. That night I met these foreign exchange students from Korea that invited me to go booze it up with them in Napa Valley. It was fucking awesome. The next morning, I had my bag packed, ready to go. I popped into the communal kitchen to fix up some breakfast and while I was reading the paper, two girls came over to my table and we struck up a conversation. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, I was in the backseat of a rental car on the way to Vegas. All sorts of Vegas shit went down, all of them ceaselessly winning, but I’ll spare you the gory details.

But I think the big takeaway from all this is that

a.) girls from out of town/state/country/hemisphere are down to fuck mostly because there’s explicit acknowledgement that they won’t ever see you again and

b.) traveling alone is awesome

c.) you can live out of a messenger bag