the migration patterns of the happily disallusioned

so i had a little issue come up the other day. i had to get out of montenegro since the 90 days i could legally be here on just a passport were about up.

the great thing about montenegro - since it's not a member of the infamous schengen gang - is that once you exit, you can just re-enter and the 90 day clock starts over. not true with those schengen thugs whose 25 (damn you switzerland for joining them in 2008!) member countries who, unless you manage to wrangle a temporary residence permit out of them, only allow you to stay a total of 90 days within any 180 day period. that's not 90 days in each country. that's 90 days cumulative across all the member countries.

so anyway, the point is that i had to get out of montenegro for a bit. and you know what that meant? roadtrip!!!!

after 3 months, yes 3 (hello!) friggin' months in one place, i was finally on the road again! ok, indulge me. it was only for a couple days, but it... was.... the.... road!!!!!

hitchhiking from montenegro to croatia was glorious! and when i say glorious, i don't say it, i sing it - glorrrrr-iiiiiii-usssssssss!

and i finally got to hitch a taxi!!!!

ok, it's hard to explain it, but i was glowing when z and i had to walk the 1.2 kilometers (uphill, mind you) of no-man's land between the montenegrin border crossing exit and the croatian border crossing entry. glowing! i know it seems a bit silly, but for some reason, there’s just something fun about walking a border crossing, about “pulling up” to the border crossing guard booth on foot.

now, if you're wondering why hitchhikers end up walking across border crossings, well, sometimes drivers go out of their way to take you all the way to the border crossing even though they're not crossing the border themselves. and sometimes drivers who would normally love to give you a ride decide they don’t want to have to explain to a border guard why they have an international criminal in the back of their car, if indeed you turn out to be an international criminal... in this particular case, our lovely just-gone-off-duty montenegrin taxi driver couldn't take his employer-owned taxi over the border.

so anyway, i wasn't glowing just because i walked another border crossing. i was glowing because i was on the road and there were very few cars on that road, and it was getting dark, and dubrovnik was still a long way away. who would be our next ride and when would they come? (ok, so it turns out our next ride picked us up just steps after the croatian border crossing guards allowed us entry, but it could have taken longer…)

but the point is that z and i were on the road together on our first long distance hitch. he was in thongs. cheap little rubber thongs and he was walking the border crossing with me - at dusk!. and it as okay with him! z was okay with it all!

i was ecstatic in the moment. i thought about alex and bruno from aix-en-provence now on foot in southeast asia. i thought about vincent and marie from paris - the "delighted caravan" heading to india. i thought about the last group of couchsurfers we had just hosted, all of them solo hitchhikers who happened to converge on our place at the same time, all of them from different parts of the world and all of them heading to different parts of the world.

i thought about all of us, all of us disillusioned with the trappings of conventional life and, all of us following our own migration patterns across the globe and happily - ecstatically - finding meaning in the places and people and moments along the way.