I don’t want to be too overly dramatic here, but I feel as if this trip has firmly closed a chapter of my life for good.  I started the trip as a quarter-life crises of sorts as well as because of a general yearning to see the world and break out of the borders of the United States.  A lot of friends and family have sent emails and made comments about how lucky I am to have a year of vacationing.  Let me clear something up just a bit – backpacking is not like a vacation – although there are definitely points throughout the trip where I am sitting in a hammock on a beach with glistening white sand, clear blue waters and an icy beverage in hand, there have also been some majorly stressful moments peppered throughout the awesomeness.

Which brings me to the death of my youth. I found my first gray hair yesterday.  Wait, not gray, shining and glisteningly white.  Jenn spotted it when I leaned over mid-laughter.  It was about three inches long and pure white. I have a theory on why this hair exists, let’s take a moment to look back over the past seven months to the highly stressful moments that have coincided with all of my other adventures:

-         Prepping: Deciding to plan a RTW trip in less than five months and then deciding to set up my RTW travel blog before departing was intense!

-         The Bangkok Debacle:  This little stressor certainly played a part in the birth of the white hair. After buying a $600 international flight and then being told that I couldn’t board the plane – well, panic ensued.  The three hours that it took me to deal with my broken laptop, purchase a new international ticket out of Thailand and then find myself the last person boarding the flight – stressful doesn’t even come close to describing it!

-         My Laos Illness: There was a point that I should have been airlifted out of the country during this week of bacteria illness.  Because I chose to go off the beaten track a bit, however, I was forced to improvise and pull through the dehydration, exhaustion, and illness with my last packets of Emergen-C, the last of my Ciprofloxin pills in my med-kit, and hope for the best.  Although I wanted to go home at the time and was completely over the whole “backpacking” thing, I am glad I stayed in the long run…even if it did likely contribute to the white hair.

-         The Indian Visa Situation: Both times I had to apply for my Indian Visa I have been stressed out to the max.  I got my first visa in Phnom Penh, Cambodia at the Indian Embassy and it was issued for three instead of six months.  This bit me in the butt three months later when I had to use a bit of baksheesh, or bribery, to get a single day transit visa back into the country from Kathmandu (my Indian visa had expired three days previously) so that I could catch my international flight back into the developed world.

Now, this is not me whining – but rather taking a moment to reflect on the changes.  I loved being fresh-faced and twenty but, even with the stressors and the subsequent white hair, I wouldn’t change a thing about deciding to travel around the world for nearly a year :)  Just know, it hasn’t always been a picnic!