Space For An Odyssey

I have experienced perfection few times in my short life; confessing my love to my first girlfriend, watching Nick Cave live at an intimate solo show, seeing a rainbow light up the sky at the conclusion of my grandfathers funeral. But it was only until I traversed Europe that I experienced pure, unadulterated bliss.
It was an impulse decision to go off-course of our journey - as it so often is - but our newfound travel companions had convinced us to temporarily abandon our itinerary for Ceský Krumlov, a small town in the Czech Republic. The bait was simple but all too irresistible: a river rafting pub crawl.
The hostel dropped us at the top of the river with a four man raft and a couple of oars each, but the oars soon proved themselves unnecessary as the river itself lazily cruised us towards the bank-side shanties that refreshed us with two euro cups of ale. Every now and again we would pull over and take to land, sometimes to refresh ourselves with alcoholic beverages, other times to simply take a moment and comprehend the stellar beauty around us.
We would take it in turns to swim alongside the raft, in an effort to cool off from the sun that beamed down on us from the cloudless sky. Minutes quickly turned to hours as we all talked and drank and admired the sights and sounds around us.
Then, quite miraculously, everything became silent. The soothing sound of flowing water was the only audible thing for a good ten minutes of our journey. No one talked, we just sat in near silence.
It was in that tiny fraction of my life that, all of a sudden, every worry I had stored in my brain just disappeared. The constant fear of running out of money, and of what I would do when this was all over, everything evaporated from my completely relaxed body. The weight of every stress I carried with me was lifted; and I sank further into the raft with an ultimate happiness that I did not know was achievable.
The silence was abruptly broken by a fellow raftsman falling overboard, followed by involuntary bellows of laughter from myself and the other crew members. We continued onwards into our perfect night of beer, bathers, and banter without care of anything but the tight-knit family we had created in a single day.
I know I will experience pure, unadulterated bliss again in my life, but I will never forget that first time, or the people that made it so.