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Hi, this is Dylan Thuras,and you have reached the Atlas Obscura podcast line. I am not home right now, but please leave me a message all about your stories of traveling internationally for the very first time. Tell me your story after the beep.

This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.

Yeomen of the Guard, Tower of London Paul Wever / CC BY 2.0 Guest 1: Hey, Atlas Obscura. The first time I ever traveled internationally, I was going to Germany. My family was moving there. I was about to be a junior in college, and I was planning to just go over for a few weeks during the summer and then come back and go to school in person. Of course, it being the summer of 2020, it didn’t work out that way, and I ended up having to rearrange my whole schedule and take all my classes online in Germany with a seven-hour time difference. Woo!

But the actual trip to Germany was extraordinary. We were traveling together, so we got on a plane pretty early in the morning, and we headed out, and we’re on this really long flight that I remember perhaps 15 or 18 hours into being awake flying over the French coastline and looking out and thinking, “Wow, the Atlantic Ocean is west of me.” Amazing.

And then by the time we landed at the second airport and got all of our luggage—it was so much luggage—and we got on the bus that would take us to where we were actually going to be living, I had been awake for more than 24 hours at that point. I was so tired. I was fully loopy. And as we were on the bus driving to where would be home, I was looking out at the hills, and my mind started overlaying Van Gogh paintings onto this countryside, and I’m like, “Wow, wow, it all really looks like that!”

I mean, there were wind turbines and modern buildings and all, but the countryside was there, and it was just—it was amazing. So that’s the story of the first time I went to Germany in the beginning of a really pretty amazing year. I’m very glad I got to do it.

**Guest 2:**My first trip abroad alone was to Switzerland in 1986 after my sophomore year of high school. I was attending a boarding school in Connecticut, and the father of one of my friends was a somewhat famous author, and they lived in Europe, and my friend invited me to come and visit them in Gstaad, Switzerland in a chalet that they were staying there.

When my parents picked me up from school at the end of the school year, I asked them casually if I could go to Switzerland to visit him if I earned the money for the plane fare. I was a little surprised when they said yes, and I think they were surprised when I actually earned the money.

But I did, and in early August, I took off from JFK in New York and flew to Geneva. I didn’t know much French, but I did manage to get from the airport to the train station in Geneva. From the train station there to Gstaad, I think there was a transfer along the way, and once I got to Gstaad, I had an amazing two weeks there visiting my friend and his family.

My friend had these motorbikes, so we motorbiked all around town and up into the mountains and along the roads. At one point, he pulled off on this turnout along one of the mountain roads and pointed me to the side of the mountain, which from a distance looked like a rock wall. When you got up close, though, you saw it was a screen that was painted gray, and if you looked inside, there was a clean, pristine concrete hallway with doors with metal bars. It was some sort of government or military facility. We threw some firecrackers in there. They exploded very loudly, and we took off quickly on the motorbikes.

At night, we would go to the discos in town. I learned how to drink whiskey Cokes, and we stayed up very, very late. One time I gave a girl a ride home on the motorbike, but I was too shy to ask her if I could kiss her goodnight.

At the chalet with the family, my friend’s family, they taught me how to play the card game hearts, which I had never played, and I remember one time I shot the moon pretty much accidentally. I don’t know if they let me do it, or I just was collecting all the hearts, and all of a sudden it was inevitable, but it was a surprise, I think, to everyone at the table that that happened.

The day I was leaving, my train out was at something like 6:00 a.m., but I didn’t have alarm clocks, so I stayed up all night so I didn’t miss the train. I walked the two miles or so from the chalet to the train station with my luggage in the early morning hours, made the train, fell asleep almost immediately, almost missed my transfer, but I did make it back to Geneva, onto the plane home to the U. S., I made it home safely, and it’s just just such a terrific memory, and I’m so glad that I made the trip.

Leah Washington: My name is Leah Washington. I was finishing or starting in sixth grade. My dad retired from the Air Force. We left Missouri in 1977, headed for Tehran, Iran, when the West was still quite big there, and my dad went to work for Lockheed Aircraft.

And I remember arriving in the airport, my brother, my mom, my dad, and I, in Tehran, and coming out into the airport, into this sea of chadors—the coverings that the women wore—men holding hands, hugging each other, and just the sea of strangeness and oddness and newness, coming as a 12-year-old in 1977, and getting in the taxi, and going across the city to our apartment to start our lives there.

The country was beautiful. The people were beautiful and kind, and the food—driving on the roads was insane, and it was one of the best experiences of my life. My parents were so cool in that time. They actually asked my brother and I before we went if we wanted to go and what we thought, and us being an Air Force family, we said, “Let’s go.”

And we were there when the Shah Revolution started and left as things of student uprisings occurred, and it’s still one of my best memories and one of the best experiences, and I’m so glad my parents said yes to the experience and that we had it.

Stacy: Hey, Atlas Obscura. My name is Stacy, and I wanted to share my story about my first international trip. When I was 18, I went on an Ambassadors of Music trip to Europe. The trip overall was amazing and sparked my wanderlust for the next 20-plus years, but I want to talk specifically about my most harrowing part of that trip when I got left at the Tower of London.

So, everyone in my group wanted to go see the Crown Jewels, but I was more interested in a different exhibit. I don’t even remember what it was now, but by the time I realized it, it was well past the group rendezvous time, and the central square that had been bustling with tourists just an hour before was now hauntingly quiet.

As I stood there trying to figure out my next move, and not panic, one of the Yeoman Warders, aka Beefeaters, stepped out of the mist, approached me, and said in his beautiful brogue, “Did you know that seven people were executed in this spot? Six of them were women. Five of them were redheads.”

He must have been very amused with himself as my face likely turned as bright as my fiery hair. I think I smiled sheepishly and thanked him for the interesting fact before bolting to the exit. I did thankfully end up finding my group a couple hours later, and vowed to stick like glue for the rest of the remainder of the trip.

Frederic: Hello Atlas Obscura, Frederic from Normandy in France. I wanted to share with you my first international travel. It was when I was 17, I’m over 40 now, and it was to New York. So we had like this thing for teenagers at my father’s job, and well, I went with, I think it was a dozen of other kids. We went to Montreal first, and then we rented a minivan and we went to New York.

It was a life-changing moment really for me to just step out of the minivan in New York, once we parked—the huge building, the vibrant streets and the cars everywhere, and it was just dizzying. So we spent like, I think it was two or three days in New York.

We were given pretty much a lot of free time there. So well, I just went and explored the city. I went to Chinatown on my own, I went to the Financial District, I went to the New York Stock Exchange, don’t ask me why, I don’t know why I went there. And I went to the Empire State Building of course. I just went around and I just lost myself in the city, and it was just so, it was like in the movies and the series I watched back then.

I wanted to go and see the World Trade Center, so I was just there at the bottom of them. I was looking up, and they were so huge, such huge towers. So that was August of 2001, and you can imagine basically what I felt when like a month later, they were gone. I mean, that was it.

So basically now I’m just thinking every time I go someplace, just go there. There’s no next time, I just go there if I can, because that taught me that even the biggest buildings won’t be around forever. So just go there.

**Dylan Thuras:**We want your stories of traveling with a significant other for the first time. Your dating travel stories. You don’t have to have stayed together. It could have gone very badly. Or maybe that trip was the thing that set your relationship in motion. They can be sweet, or they can be embarrassing, unexpected, shocking. Yeah, we want your travel stories with a romantic partner.

Give us a call at 315-992-7902 and leave us a message telling your name and story. Mailbox will cut you off after two minutes, so call back if you get disconnected. Or record a voice memo and email it to us at hello@atlasobscura.com.

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This episode was produced by Manolo Morales. Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Stitcher Studios. The people who make our show include Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Kameel Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manolo Morales, Baudelaire, Gabby Gladney, Amanda McGowan, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tyndall.