Chapter 2: Unexpected Adventures
The summer that Collin and I were 16, we went to Europe for 5 weeks to help serve as junior staff for a Christian leadership training program. We spent the majority of our time in beautiful Lausanne, Switzerland, with the exception of a 10 day excursion to Sofia, Bulgaria. We thought that this program was going to be a pretty smooth operation, logistically speaking, because we had done a training school on their US base the summer prior. As it turns out, it felt quite experimental and fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants in terms of operations and logistics. This was because the two main leaders who were put in charge were 19 year old American kids who had never run an international training program with 50 participants from all over the world. This particular summer program in Switzerland was never renewed in subsequent years due to just how many mishaps and miscalculations occured. We were some of the lucky guinea pigs who got to experience the magic of being on a badly run, peer-led summer trip with the loose mission to become better leaders. It was a circuitous path, but in the end, we achieved our stated goal. And Collin and I fell in love during the process.
There are many stories I could recount from this trip, so I’ll just stick with a few stand outs.
For context, if we’re speaking in terms of archetypal Tolkien characters, well, Collin’s always been an Aragorn. Disguised as a ruggedly independent individual with piercings, baggy jeans, and edgy hair (he used to put his Elmer’s glue in his hair!!), he never wanted to be identified as a leader back then. But leadership has always been indelibly etched onto his soul. Heads of organizations and programs have always recruited him for leadership, despite his attempts to just do his own thing. And he may have declined the offer when he was invited to serve as staff for this program—if it hadn’t been in Switzerland AND if his role wasn’t to be the rhythm guitarist in a band they were forming for the summer. He was a talented and accomplished guitarist by 16 with a wanderlust to explore moutainous places. So, the opportunity to go to Swiss Alps to play in a band tipped the scales for him. I don’t really know how I convinced the organization to recruit me (I don’t think that’s even a thing but I’ve pulled the “put me in, coach!” approach multiple times in my life), but somehow I did convince the organizers that I’d be a good addition to this mission too. So they asked me to join the support staff (which meant that I was a glorified groupie who promoted their band all summer).
For our first three weeks in Switzerland, this newly formed band practiced playing music together, composed original songs, and then performed local shows. They were talented, and their music was a fun kind of Indie Pop/Rock (a novel thing for talented musicians of the late 90s who were more into hardcore, emo, or heavy rock). I was used to Collin’s band back at home having a melancholy, angsty vibe. Their music was beautiful and the band members extremely talented, but it was also heavy and sad content. It was really fun with this summer Indie band to get to dance and have fun to the peppy yet cleverly and skillfully composed music they performed. They put on a great show, too. The front man had massive amounts of self confidence—a perfect persona for a band—and was quite a performer. He’d create costumes out of random materials he found on the program base and then tie it into his act. One night he wore what appeared to be a very DIY astronaut suit, for example.
All of their rehearsals and shows in Switzerland were ultimately in preparation for the band to take their music to Bulgaria during week four of the trip. We had been told that things were in a bit of a newly post-communism slump in Sofia in 1998. When we arrived, we saw what they meant. Our lodging was bleak and all too typical of the area; our building felt like something post-apocalyptic; the elevator would get stuck between floors regularly, and we’d have to pry the doors open and climb up and out. Collin would hoist himself up first, and then he’d pull us one by one up to the floor where he was. Sometimes that meant you’d be exiting on a floor without electricity and with people squatting in there. We heard gunshots outside our building every night as the local mafia would conduct business. Things felt a little grim in Sofia at that time, to say the least, so this band’s expressed purpose was to bring hope and joy to the people there with positive lyrics, cool music, and DIY costumes made of discarded items left behind on the base. The band members were up for the task—they were a bunch of talented and hilarious musicians—also, good-looking—who named their band, “King Henry and the Clotted Milk Biscuits” for reasons that escape me now. I mean, basically, it was funny.
All that prep work in Switzerland paid off, and they hit the Bulgarian ground running. During their mere 10 days touring in Sofia, King Henry and the Clotted Milk Biscuits rose to a surprising level of fame throughout the city. Just from playing out in clubs nightly and some connections that they made in the process, the band was soon invited to the Bulgarian MTV studio for an interview and to play a live set. The whole ordeal was broadcast live on national television. During a live broadcast on tv, one girl called in to the studio to ask Collin to marry her. He politely declined. After that broadcast, hoards of obxnoxiously attractive Bulgarian girls would scream when they saw any of the band members—but especially Collin (it was that glued hair, so help me God)—and they’d chase him down and swarm him to ask for his autograph.
One of my most poignant memories from that portion of the trip, however, was the incident with Collin almost getting left behind in Bulgaria. Maybe that fangirl who wanted to marry Collin had connections with the airline…or the mafia. Whatever the case was, the main program leaders (who, as a reminder, were 19 years old) didn’t make sure there were enough boarding passes for everyone to board the return flight home. This was a different era in a different land; no one was matching passports with the names on the boarding pass, so it was not obvious that we were one short until mostly everyone had boarded the plane. So when one, 13 year-old (incidentally an aspiring magician named Justin, as I recall) was left without a boarding pass, Collin gave his to him.
It was just the head program leader and Collin left in the airport at that point, and Collin was like, “Well, what should we do?” The leader’s response was, “I think there’s a bus that will get you back to Switzerland, man. It might go through Serbia…? Sorry, I gotta get on the plane now before it leaves.” Collin’s attempts to say, “Isn’t Serbia in the midst of a civil war?” did not reach him as he entered the jetway. In his defense, as a “missions kid” (someone who grew up on a missions organization base and going on half-baked international trips since he was born) he probably thought that was a pretty normal thing to have to navigate by age 16. However, it was not.
Meanwhile, I was sitting on the plane, unaware of this whole boarding pass situation, and getting more anxious by the minute that Collin had not boarded. I was staring at the plane door willing him to get on the plane when they closed the doors. My heart started pounding as I realized something was not right, and this plane was about to leave. Seconds later, the plane was literally rolling away from the jetway, and then started cruising towards the runway. A sense of urgency seized me, so I stood up and started screaming for the pilot/flight crew to stop the plane. My panic and distress transcended any language barriers, and—to my eternal gratitude—when I explained to the attendants that we were missing a member of our group, they relayed my message to the pilot. He stopped the plane, and as I looked out my tiny airplane window I saw a tiny golf-cart like airport vehicle racing Collin down the tarmac to the plane. Our cabin crew opened the plane door, and he had to climb up inside the plane from the vehicle. My whole heart walked into the cabin. With glued hair. And then we returned to Switzerland.
After the organized leadership program and tour de Bulgaria ended, Collin, I, and a handful of others spent a week trekking around Switzerland, sleeping by the train tracks, wild-camping in the mountains (even though it was illegal and we didn’t know that), and eventually ended up in Venice, Italy for a day before returning back to the program headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland. Again, these adventures were in the spirit of what would eventually become trademark for our relationship—I have a whim for an inspired adventure, and Collin brings it to life. I saw back then that this 16 year old version of Collin was simultaneously the most daring and the most responsible one in our party. Dreamy combination for my adventurous yet somewhat logistically/navigationally lacking soul.
There were also magical moments shared—ordinary and extraordinary—that comprise the memory montage I have of Collin and me falling in love. We’d walk to class together every morning, talking and laughing. Every night we’d lay out on the grass under the stars and talk and laugh some more as we witnessed countless shooting stars. During each day, we spent every waking hour together as much as possible. We started finishing each other’s sentences about the most random things; we’d fall asleep on each other’s shoulders on long train rides. For two Demi-romantic individuals (that means your romantic and physical attraction hinges on being friends first and foremost), it was beyond a dream come true. I had found my soul mate, and every day it became more real that we got each other differently than anyone else could or had. Every day, I felt myself falling a little bit more in love despite my formerly guarded and skeptical of love 16 year old self. We existed in our own orbit, and we were locked into a magnetism from that trip onward that has only gotten stronger. As close as we were that summer, and as strong as the pull was to make it official, we agreed (again, both way more responsible for our ages than our alternative, late 90’s post-grunge style led people to believe) that we wanted to keep our committment level at friendship for a while longer. We both had our own inner work we wanted to do before getting into a committed relationship with one another because we knew that once we let ourselves fully commit and fall entirely in love, there was no going back.
That summer in Switzerland expanded my mind, my heart, my reality of what could be. For a girl from Delaware where you never get more than 448 feet above sea level, the alps were gorgeous on a different scale than I had ever witnessed. I had traveled extensively in the United States, but I had never experienced quite that level of extraordinary beauty. The rocky peaks extended into the clouds, dramatically edged and defined against the deep, blue sky. Glaciers, thick, and emitting a luminescent blue color, were thickly layered across the mountains. The lakes and rivers were glacier-colored blues and greens, and they were pristine. The chocolate was superior to anything I had ever tasted. The streets were so polished that the five second rule could be extended to a five minute rule with no problems. The water fountains running along the street were channeling such pure, spring water, you could fill your water bottle right from them without a care. The weather and subsequent lush ecosystem of the valleys were also lovely during our summer there—clear, blue skies and lush green trees and meadows. Honestly, it was idyllic. The only thing better than falling in love per se, was falling in love in Switzerland.
