On One Year After Rock Bottom (in Sardinia & Paris)

On August 29th, I wake at the crack of dawn on the beautiful island of Sardinia, Italy, and everything proceeds to go wrong.

Perhaps anniversaries are more powerful than I expected.

It’s just another day on the calendar. The one-year milestone of being wrongfully arrested and spending a night in jail.

Just another day. I plan on celebrating. I get to wake up in Sardinia and go to sleep in Paris! And yet…it seems like bad juju has been infused into the day from the moment I woke up. 

Traveling with a friend, we miss our original flight because the taxi comes late. And then we miss the possibility of the next three flights because we left our passports in the hotel safe, an hour away from the airport.

An hour of driving to the airport, an hour of driving back to the hotel, and then another hour of driving back to the airport. All with a taxi driver who doesn’t speak any English and doesn’t understand we are in hurry until the last leg, at which point some serious car sickness ensues.

This is all exacerbated by having had just an espresso for breakfast. Not only was this pure acid eating away at my car sick stomach, but as a diabetic, my blood sugar is in the danger zone by the time I got back to the airport.

After a serious struggle to put together a flight to Bologna with a doubtful connection to Paris, where I need to be in order to catch my flight home to Salt Lake City the next morning, we then discover that the hotel in Paris had been booked for the wrong date, for the night before.

Oy.

Everything that could go wrong seems to have gone wrong, except that I do not believe that in the slightest. 

Yes, I’ll admit I threw up in the single airport bathroom while women eager to relieve themselves kept knocking at the door.

Overall though, I feel buoyant. I realize then that a predictable silver lining of surviving really awful experiences is that the richter scale of awfulness is forever adjusted. After a night in jail, there was no way to dampen my mood due to a few travel plot twists. 

I controlled what I could and rolled with the rest. All I kept thinking was how happy I was to be in Italy and if the universe was hell bent on keeping me there, I would by all means enjoy my delayed return.

The more I embraced the experience of the moment, the more my luck turns. 

After ordering a much-needed panini, I learned that the little cafe in the Sardinia airport only took Euros – no credit cards. Of course, I didn’t have enough.

The compassionate cashier simply took what I had and then also threw in a bottle of water.  

The RyanAir flight to Bologna pulled in 5 minutes late, which makes a big difference when you have less than 20 minutes to get off the plane, go through customs and security again, and then get to your new gate at an international airport.

But I made it to Paris, against all odds. 

And then I had the best dinner of my life. And walked down the Champs-Élysées at midnight to the Arc de Triomphe.

Triumph. 

I woke up in Sardinia. I toasted to my rock bottom in Paris.

I can appreciate the adversity that shifted my life trajectory permanently.

I’ve experienced more in the past year than in the rest of my life combined. And none of it would have happened if I hadn’t gotten a taste of how ugly, unfair, and painful life can be.