My long-anticipated family vacation to Europe began unexpectedly with no family and no Europe. On the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, I found myself walking the streets of New York City, taking pictures and shopping to my heart's content, conversing with strangers, getting lost for the sake of adventure, and every once and a while checking my email to see what my parents and two brothers were up to in Spain. Let's back up. Saturday night back in St. Louis at about 10:30 p.m., the procrastinating Fleddermann family was still packing bags and organizing passports. We were planning on leaving the house at 5:30 the next morning for a connecting flight to New York before taking off for Barcelona. That's when we realized my passport was expired. It only takes five years to expire if you get it when you're 15, where as the rest of my family (all older than me) had passports valid for ten years. So then came the initial shock followed by panic followed by Dad intimidating people on the phone, Eric researching possibilities, Mom insisting we rush to the airport and talk to them ourselves, and Adam remaining calm as usual. The night of "family crisis," as Mom refers to it, brought us to go ahead and hop on the flight to New York together. I think one of the weirdest feelings I've ever had is when I said goodbye to to my family at LaGuardia airport as they headed off to Europe and the country I had most looked forward to visiting. But we had a plan. I took a cab to the apartment of a family friend who I hadn't seen in years but was nice enough to welcome me until I figured everything out. So that was my home base: a leather couch in a relatively spacious loft apartment in the heart of Manhattan. I was not complaining. So I went to Bryant Park and Central Park. I drank coffee on the Metropolitan Art Museum steps. I ate lunch solo at a bistro in the Upper East Side. At night, I shopped around Bloomingdales. I strolled in to bars and made friends with others around me. There was a group of local Manhattan 20-somethings, a bartender that used to be a football coach, and an older man from South Africa that told me about where he had traveled and where he plans to go next. I of course told him about my travels, and how I was "supposed" to be in Barcelona with my family, but was I really? Here I was, having a once in a lifetime experience. There will probably be no other time in my life that I would be wandering a big city, this young, with absolutely no plan or reason. It was freeing, and it would have never been possible if something didn't go terribly wrong. On Tuesday, I went to a sketchy looking office at the Rockefeller center where I found the magic express passport-getting company called "It's Easy." No, I'm not kidding. I'm not going to go through the tedious process and ridiculous amount of money I had to pay, but by midnight or so that night I was on my first international flight, squished up next to some South African strangers (that later of course became new friends), more eager than ever to see my family. I landed in London and spent 6 hours at the Heathrow airport before getting on my connecting flight to Barcelona. There's not really any point to this part of the story except I did indulge in my first legal pint overseas, chatted with a woman from Pennsylvania for about an hour, thoroughly enjoyed everyone's accents, and can now say I've (sort of) been to London. Note: Airports in London do not inform passengers of their boarding time/gate until it is time to board. I got distracted for a bit (and who is used to military time, anyway?) and ended up full-on sprinting to make my flight. It would have been boring otherwise, right? Keep in mind my phone has been dead for countless hours and I don't have an outlet adapter for the UK. So I hadn't spoken to my parents or anyone else since early in the previous day in New York, and my mom is just about positive I've been kidnapped or missed my flight (why would she think such a thing?). So my reunion with my family at the Barcelona airport was both exciting and emotional, but honestly all I could do was laugh. This entire ordeal was so Fleddermann family (or "Fled-fam sketch-fam" as we sometimes say). My family thought I was suffering when in reality I was gaining an experience I would never have any other way. Being completely alone is an opportunity that is rarer than we think. I embraced that opportunity, learned, lived, and will never forget it.
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