Stokes Leaves in Smoke

From a young age, I constantly informed my mother of all the places I hoped to go when I was older. "Mom, I want to go to Spain, can you teach me Spanish?!" and "Mom, I want to be a wildlife photographer in Kenya!" were expressions which came from my tongue quite often. Of course, coming from a middle class family which lived paycheck to paycheck with two younger siblings, travel was nearly impossible throughout my lifetime. I had never taken a true vacation, and I never even left my little midwestern town in Ohio until I was thirteen. Throughout middle and high school, I had the chance to travel to larger cities in the East: New York, Philadelphia, D.C., Atlanta, but I had never been West of the Mississippi River. That is, until the day I decided to treat myself to a plane ticket clear to Los Angeles.

My best friend has a brother who moved to Los Angeles with the aspiration of becoming an actor, and I jumped at the invitation to travel out with her to visit for a while. We purchased our tickets a while before our high school graduation and waited...and waited. It came to be that we were counting down the days we would hop on the plane rather than counting down the days for our own graduation! Days passed before our eyes, our big day a blur in the pure bliss that came on the day we were to leave our boring little town for the hustle and bustle of the one and only Los Angeles.

For my very first plane ride, I was more concerned by my lack of fear than for the possibilities all those movies and flights-gone-wrong stories you hear about. It all seemed so simple, yet so new to me. I had never felt so overwhelmed with emotion until the moment I was thousands of feet in the air, hovering over Chicago as it met the waterfront. Tears came to my eyes and in that very moment I knew that this was what was meant for me; constant travel was the life I wanted to live. My first time in California solidified this notion even more.

There were so many moments where I thought to myself "This is amazing", in both the best and the worst of ways. Seeing an airport worker clean up puke with a broom and dustpan and getting stranded in Santa Monica after the buses had stopped running and having no way home were definitely those "DOH!" moments, but lying on the warm sand in Malibu, taking kickboxing classes in Burbank, and even getting tattoos in Hollywood completely made up for that with bliss, the realization that life is beautiful, and that first times are worth it all.