On Monday evening (11/27), my cousin Lauren (Lo, for short) and I are headed to Spain. The trip is for her birthday, but really, we also just love to travel. We’ll be there for just over a week, traveling to Madrid, Barcelona, a brief stop in Cordoba for the night, and Ronda, where we hope to do some hiking.

When Lo and I travel, we spend the majority of the time laughing. Mostly at ourselves, often at the ridiculous situations that we find ourselves in. Like the hotel room in Amsterdam where we found a mysterious wig on the floor, and upon showing the hotel manager, he replied, “Woah, you didn’t expect that, did you?!”.  Because, does anyone? Or the 300 times we crossed the same canal in Amsterdam trying to find the Torture Museum. Then there was that time we accidentally ended up in a window in the Red Light Museum. Or when we thought we had mistakenly trained into Germany without our passports (because we hadn’t planned on leaving Belgium). These are just a few of many examples. But the point is, with all of this ridiculousness we laugh. Many times until we’re practically crying.

Travel in and of itself gives me hope. Connecting with people across cultures and countries, trying and learning new customs, finding hidden gems that we somehow stumbled into, often literally in Lo and my case. It bridges gaps between countries and people. I’ve found myself sitting in a hole-in-the-wall bar where everyone’s watching a football (soccer, Americans) game, and suddenly absorbed in the cheering for some local team I hadn’t heard of before walking in. I’ve made lifelong friends from around the world during my travels.

So as Lo and I travel and exude ridiculousness throughout Spain, I’ll be instagramming and keeping my journal, in order to blog when I get back home. It may be simply happy and funny moments throughout my trip which made me smile, or silly experiences that made me laugh (surely some of those), or something that I learned along the way.

Until the blogs, make sure to follow Spread Hope Project on Instagram, for more frequent updates on our Spain adventures!

In Amsterdam, after the wig incident, and on about 3 hours of sleep from an overnight flight.