I traveled through Vietnam with my best friend.

I realized last week that I just realized young me’s lifelong dream — traveling with my best friend.

I spent half of high school planning cross-country road trips, researching the best routes, measuring my parents’ minivan to see what size blow-up mattress I could fit in it. We never went. One time my roommate, best friend, and I road-tripped all of three hours from Raleigh to Norfolk, Virginia to see a 100 gecs concert on Halloween, and I thought maybe that would be as good as it would ever get. Don’t get me wrong, that trip was insane. Lots of inside jokes came out of it, and we had an incredible time at the concert. But it was no two-week-long coming-of-age story road trip through the unknown, Jack Kerouac style (I’ve never read that book so not sure how long their road trip is).

But two weeks ago, that dream was finally realized in Vietnam.

After traveling for almost two years, multiple of Jordan’s friends had come to visit. Jordan’s mom made the trip out too. But I hadn’t had any friends come visit, and I can’t blame them, I’m pretty far away and they’re pretty busy. But still, traveling with your best friends seems so cool, and I was getting jealous having watched Jordan get to do it twice.

Finally, after months of wearing my friends down, my friend Emery decided to come visit. Conveniently, she was visiting the same time as Jordan’s parents. So I prepared a kick-ass itinerary for the five of us, and we all traveled across Vietnam together.

the gang.

---

I was so unbelievably excited when I saw her. Jordan and I were late picking her up from the hotel (typical), but I spotted her from a few blocks away. I thought it would be an hour of “how are you” and “how have you been,” the awkward catching-up dance you do when you haven’t seen someone in a while.

But we just slipped into an easy rhythm. We went to lunch, and it was like seeing her after a week. We barely even touched on what we’d been up to for the past two years. It was almost like just seeing each other was enough catching up, and we focused on the present, on what we were doing right then.

---

I’ve talked before about the joy of traveling with someone who hasn’t been traveling for the past two years, seeing everything with fresh eyes. It reminds you how beautiful everything is around you, how grateful you should be to be exactly where you are right now.

Sometimes I feel like seeing so many beautiful things makes you not blasé, but definitely desensitized. You’re seeing so much beauty every single day that it just becomes normal. The temples, the mountains, the markets, they all start to blur together after a while. You stop noticing exactly how beautiful they are.

But seeing it through Emery’s eyes reminded me just how incredibly lucky I am to be able to see such beautiful things so often. It was like I was seeing in technicolor again.

Especially on the Ha Giang Loop. I’d been in Khao Sok National Park in Thailand with its comparable limestone peaks just weeks before. But seeing the awe on Emery’s face, on Jordan’s parents’ faces, reminded me just how beautiful the scenery in front of me actually was.

And that’s a really cool thing about traveling with a friend after being on the road for almost two years, it recalibrates you. It reminds you to actually look at what you’re seeing instead of just moving through it.

---

Obviously, Jordan and I have been traveling together for almost two years, so it isn’t always easy for me to welcome people with different travel habits into the dynamic. But it was really nice to have Emery and Jordan’s parents around.

But don’t get me wrong, it was exhausting. I planned almost everything, so I was always stressing slightly, praying that everything actually went according to plan (which it didn’t always).

Also, when I usually travel, it’s pretty slowly, it feels kind of like endurance instead of sprints. I have plenty of time to see and do everything I want because I stay for a lot longer. But trying to do north-to-south Vietnam in two weeks was pretty breakneck. Near the end of the trip, working off five to six hours of sleep every night because I had to work at night after traveling and walking and doing stuff all day, I got a pretty gnarly head cold that I’m still sleeping off four days after Emery left.

But even through the exhaustion, it was worth it. Because traveling with Emery meant doing things I wouldn’t normally do. Jordan is my boyfriend, and I love him, but there are some things he and I would never do together: spa days, getting our nails done, hitting up a new cute coffee place every day. All things I do love doing. So it was nice to have not only an excuse but a person to do these things with.

I feel like that’s a really special part about traveling with a best friend. It fills a different space than traveling with a partner. With Jordan, I’ve built a routine. We know each other’s rhythms, our habits, when we need space and when we need closeness. It’s comfortable. It’s home.

But with Emery, it was playful in a way I’d forgotten I missed. We did so much just walking and talking and riffing. I love riffing with my friends, warping jokes into unintelligible babble that only we could possibly understand.

When Emery left, I didn’t want her to go. It was so nice traveling with her. But I also knew I needed to get back into a slower rhythm, to catch up on all the work I was behind on, to sleep for more than six hours a night.

And if I’m being honest, I felt jealous. She gets to go back and hang out with all our other friends now. I miss them all so much. I’m on the other side of the world doing this thing I chose to do, and they’re all still there, living their lives, seeing each other. And now Emery gets to go back to that, and I don’t.

It’s a strange feeling, being so grateful for where you are while simultaneously aching for where you’re not.

---

So after two weeks of non-stop amazing travel with my best friend, I didn’t leave my bed for almost two days and here’s what I noticed:

I noticed that friendship doesn’t actually require constant contact to stay alive. That two years can feel like two weeks when you’re with the right person. That some friendships are so easy, so foundational, that you can pick them up exactly where you left off even after living completely different lives on opposite sides of the world.

I noticed that traveling with a best friend is different from traveling with a partner. Not better or worse, just different. It fills a space you didn’t realize was empty. It reminds you of parts of yourself you’d forgotten about, the version of you who gets her nails done and spends an hour in a coffee shop talking about nothing.

I noticed that seeing the world through someone else’s eyes makes you see it better yourself. That you can become so accustomed to beauty that you stop noticing it, and sometimes you need someone to point at a mountain and say “holy shit” for you to remember to look up.

I noticed that you can plan the perfect itinerary and still get sick at the end because you pushed too hard. That endurance and sprints are two very different kinds of travel, and mixing them is exhausting.

I noticed that I’m jealous of the life my friends get to live without me. But I’m also living a life they don’t get to live. And that’s okay. That’s the choice I made.

---

I got two weeks with my best friend on the other side of the world. Two weeks of seeing everything in technicolor again. Two weeks of being reminded why friendships matter, why staying connected across time zones and continents and completely different lives is worth the effort.

And now she’s gone, and I’m back to my slower rhythm, and I miss her. But I also now have two weeks of memories that fulfilled a lifelong dream of mine.

xx abby

Do you like reading my posts? Are you subscribed yet?

If you liked this post, please share or restack it so others can find my writing.