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Chapter 1: Scott and Kelly
Bucharest, Romania — August 2025
Kelly woke at sunrise with a nagging feeling she’d made a mistake. Scott, her husband, snuggled up to her side, the silky sheets gently brushing against her cheeks. She’d been stirring all night. Quietly, she reached for her phone to check the digital calendar that they shared. 8:00 PM: Bus to Sofia from the Bucharest bus station.
Something wasn’t right.
She scrolled through her email folder called “Tickets” to check the e-tickets directly; flights to Istanbul, trains to Amsterdam, museum entries for the Louvre. I’ve got to come up with a better system for storing tickets, she thought. She found the Flixbus tickets for Sofia.
Oh crap. She cringed, springing upright, knocking Scott to his back.
The departure time read 8:00 AM. Not 8:00 PM. Their bus was leaving in fifty-five minutes.
“Scott, honey, wake up! Wake up!” Kelly jostled him. “We need to go! The bus leaves at 8 AM!”
“What? You said the tickets were for tonight.”
“I screwed up on the military time. The bus leaves this morning,” Kelly said as she stood up, pulling her phone charger from the wall.
Scott bolted from bed, brushed his teeth, started the instant kettle, and gathered his things. Kelly frantically re-assembled her ditty bag, pulled her dirty clothes together, and stuffed them into her carry-on.
The bus station was too far to walk with the time they had remaining. Kelly checked Uber. A ride would get them there in forty minutes.
Scott shoved the rest of his stuff into his carry-on. Kelly coiled cords into her backpack. She tied her shoes; Scott filled to-go cups with tea.
“Got everything?” Kelly asked.
He took one last look around the room as Kelly started down the steps. “Yeah, let’s go,” Scott said as he pulled the door to their room closed.
They waved a quick goodbye to their hosts and dashed outside to the waiting Uber. We’ve packed a million times over the past five years, Kelly thought. Everything had clicked together like the last pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.
They threw everything they owned—forty pounds total between the two of them across their individual carry-ons—into the trunk of the silver Dacia, slid into the backseat, then took a breath. Kelly checked the app. Arrival: 7:52.
She dug some almonds out of her backpack. Scott shined a green apple on the tail of his shirt and handed the fruit to her, then polished a second one for himself. They ate their improvised breakfast in the Bucharest morning traffic as the city blurred past. Five years of this, Kelly thought. Five years of figuring it out.
Their life prior to launching as full-time travelers had been routine. Boring, really. Same people. Same dinners. Same parks. But this life, filled with a different set of decisions every day, thrilled Kelly, although sometimes the constant change was downright hard. It caused friction, too. Scott had always been way too meticulous for her wing-it attitude, but somehow, they made the symphony of daily decisions work.
The diesel smoke from the idling bus fumed the air as they boarded to Sofia at 7:59. The door hissed when it closed. The driver started rolling. They picked up their company-provided bottles of water and bags of sour-cream-flavored crackers from the seat behind the driver, walked down the aisle past other travelers and found the last two seats. Wide, comfortable, smelling slightly of old upholstery. Large picture windows showed the outskirts of Bucharest passing by.
“I’m sorry,” Kelly said as she leaned her head on Scott’s shoulder. “The tickets said 8:00, which of course, I translated as 8:00. But I put it on the calendar as PM rather than AM. I can’t believe I did that AGAIN. Five years on the road and my brain still reads 8:00 and assumes evening.”
“Remember. Rule one of travel day. No blaming. We’re in the seats, the luggage is secure, the error is over. Let it go. No harm. All good,” Scott said, reassuring Kelly.
They settled into their long bus ride south. The smooth roads lulled them to relax from the hectic morning. Built-in screens allowed them to connect their phones to watch videos via the bus’s wifi. While Scott queued up his favorite 1974 Grateful Dead concert, Kelly decided to read. She couldn’t wait to dive into chapter fifteen of Kate Evans’ new novel, Amazing!. She was a fantastic storyteller.
Kelly reached into the back pocket of her backpack, a move she’d done hundreds of times. Yet instead of the hard plastic of her e-reader, she felt nylon.
“Oh no.” Kelly said as she frantically searched everywhere in her backpack. She pulled out her extra change of clothes, her computer, her pouch of liquids. She unzipped every pocket. She slid her hand into the computer sleeve of her backpack again.
“Dammit. Dammit.” She paled.
“What’s wrong?” Scott asked.
“I can’t believe this. Do you have my Kindle? Tell me you grabbed it. Please tell me you did a secondary sweep.”
“Let me check.” He scrambled through his backpack.
Kelly frantically scanned her brain, replaying their chaotic departure from the hotel. Usually, her Kindle was at her bedside in the morning because she liked to read before falling asleep. Did she miss checking the bedside table? Had she read last night? Where did she leave it?
“Sorry, I don’t have it.”
“It must have fallen between the dresser and the bed in our haste to pack,” said Kelly. She leaned back in the chair, knocking her head against the seat rest.
Her stomach flip-flopped.
“I’ve left my Kindle in the hotel. It’s my brain. Oh God, Scott. It’s gone. It has everything. This is awful. Scott, I can’t lose my Kindle. I can’t.”
She scanned its contents in her mind. Her library history. That was replaceable. Her highlights in the margins of books she loved. She could live without them. Even the screenshots of travel tips she used for her Nomad Life Facebook Group. But her anxiety screamed about the seven hundred and thirty-three written notes for her next book. Scribbled in the wee hours of the morning, on trains to Vietnam and cruises to New Zealand. None of them were backed up.
None of them.
Sofia: 380 km read the highway sign.
Next: We meet Marcus and Leenie, a couple in Fresno who are about to hand over the keys to forty years of family life and discover what freedom actually feels like.
Author Notes:
The truth: I left my Kindle in the Bucharest hotel, and I really did discover its omission while on the bus to Sofia. But the morning hadn’t been hectic. Steve and I had taken a leisurely ride to the bus/train station. I found the posted train schedule (in picture above) mesmerizing. I love a train schedule; many in Europe are digital, flipping through times and destinations every few seconds. But this analog one, swoon! It reminds me of a card catalog in a library. So classic. Make sure you stop in the Bucharest station (north) to see it.
What have you left behind? Tell me how you recovered it.