Travel Ashley is very friendly.I don’t know what it is about traveling overseas that makes me want to talk to the people around me more, but whenever I am in an airport I get overwhelmingly curious about where people are going and why.When I first arrived at the Charlotte airport I sat down in a little restaurant across from my gate and made myself comfortable. I ordered a sandwich and a glass of wine and started reading. I chatted with a group of older gentlemen and helped them figure out how the wireless charging worked (I am so totally down with the young people still). A few minutes later a woman sat next to me, chatting away on her cell phone and I went back to my reading.But not for long.Talking to strangers can be kind of cathartic. You know you’ll never see them again and you just start talking.Or in this woman’s case, confessing all your sins like a teenager at Mass the day after returning from beach week.I won’t air her laundry here, but I learned a lot about this single mother in the hour we spent conversing. And maybe I learned a little about myself too, because let’s face it. Traveling is fun, but the real point of it isn’t to simply see new things, but to experience life and become better for it.At least that is how I feel about good travel.And I hadn’t even truly begun yet.My flight to Florida was pretty uneventful. I had a middle seat but at 9:30, everyone was travel weary so there wasn’t a lot of extraneous conversation…unless you count the flight attendants. Young, hip and flirty. Not that I blamed them, one of their comrades was traveling on the flight and he was quite a nice looking young man, so these young women made sure he knew it, rather loudly which distracted me momentarily from the intoxicated woman behind me who laughed like Fran Fine (Drescher) from the Nanny.In Ft. Lauderdale I was picked up by my actual traveling companion, Aunt Vicki, and Uncle Ira who ushered me to their home in a whirlwind of hospitality and love.The next day we made our flight to Chicago and one harrowing bus ride (more to come on this) later we were in the international terminal ready to board the plane to Copenhagen. We settled in to our economy plus seats…and then down plops Paige in between us. And though we were still on the ground, this girl was already higher than the 30,000 feet we would climb.Through the “that’s so lit, ya’ll” and “I dunno why I’m going to Croatia, just seemed like a good idea” conversations she managed to spill wine all over my arm and blanket throughly soaking me through so as I disembarked I smelled like I’d had quite a good time on the flight, proving that looks and smells truly can be deceiving.And through it all I smiled because this is life. Its messy and filled with unusual, sometimes obnoxious, character whom God created and lived, just as he loves me, which makes each journey worth all the trips along the way.