Nettuno, Latium — August 6, 2024

August 6, 2024. Nettuno, in Latium. 20 years ago I landed in the south of France 2 hours behind schedule. The group of students and other chaperones that I was supposed to meet at the airport were already gone. I was on this trip because I'd spent 2 months cramming French (about what it takes to speak better than someone who's taken four years of French in the American school system). I knew that I was traveling with people who knew the language, and the country, so I didn't pay much attention to the name of the town we were traveling to, or the hotel we were spending the first night in... to my dismay, that now turned out to be valuable information. After circling the airport for an hour, I hopped on a bus that I thought might be going in the right direction. 20 minutes on the bus and my palms were sweaty. I pulled the chain and got off. I walked towards the shoreline. Left or right? Right would have been doubling back, so I turned right and wandered down the waterline with my backpack, and a strong suspicion that I might now live in France... I had a very similar feeling walking up the coast of Anzio, but this time I was lost in a foreign land on purpose. I am, it turns out, not lost, but on a kind of pilgrimage.