Ched's wanderings.

I'd been backpacking by myself around Europe for nearly 4 months. It was my gap year and I didn't know I had craved adventure so much before it was my life.
I left my (ex)boyfriend at home and after working continuous shifts (sometimes day-overnight-day) at a supermarket and McDonalds in my small home town for 6 months, I had enough money to comfortable leave and do whatever I wanted until it ran out.
My arrival to England wasn't one that I remember fondly, I was held in airport jail for over five hours after I couldn't supply my ticket to Paris a girlfriend had purchased for us both. I don't really know why they left me in that room for so long, with the two way mirror and everything looking like it had been shrunk; mini seats, mini tables; mini packs of chips (to get back at the authorities I made sure I nabbed as many free chips and tampons as I could fit in my bag). They ended up marking my passport with a date so if I stayed after that day I was illegally there. I couldn't wait to burn that airport in my dust.
So about four months in I was traveling around Sicily when I was hosted in the home of a nice Sicilian man, he already had two Aussie mates staying. They suggested we take a boat out to an Island near by with a Volcano and hot mud pools, I was instantly keen.
After a fun day riding scooters around the island and bathing in mud we went back to the dock to find out the boat was cancelled because there was a storm coming. With a small chance another boat would come, we decided to wait it out meanwhile the storm was getting super hectic. When it became obvious there wasn't going to be anymore boats we tried to book into a hotel, no vacancies anywhere. After it appeared all the staff of a hotel had left we had a nap in the hotel lobby only to be woken up and told to get out in the middle of the night. We walked around the town center and found a whole block of rooms, what appeared to be some sort of village. Keys were in every door, weird. Instead of climbing into one of the lovely inviting beds we took the sheets and went to an abandoned house down near the beach to sleep on the balcony, less angry people that way. After the worst nights sleep of my life, we took the blankets back in the morning and boarded the boat to the mainland. I moved onto another town soon after and it wasn't until I ran into one of the other two Australians in a strip club (my friend was a waitress there) in Melbourne that I really thought about that little adventure again.