Standing in customs on the Isle of Lesbos, I started bleeding. Not in a girlie way, but a sudden spurt of blood erupted from my nose, covering my white T-shirt in blood. It didn’t stop. The short, olive-skinned Greek customs officer took my passport and eyed me suspiciously.

The day wasn’t shaping up so well. Yesterday, we hopped a ferry in Athens, hoping to get to Cos so we could take an easy ferry ride to Turkey. When we woke up this morning — we slept on the carpeted floor, under our seats — we were on the wrong island. Apparently, our boat never even stopped at Cos, even though the ferry crew claimed we had in fact gotten on the right boat. Well, Lesbos it was.

We drank several Nescafe Frappes while we were waiting for the late ferry to Turkey. Thanks to all of that caffeine, I was standing in the customs house covered in blood. Then, I was detained — apparently, I have the same name as a wanted French criminal. I looked at Becca and thought, "Great. This is the end. Dying in a Greek prison covered in nose bleed."

Our summer-long backpacking trip around the world started innocently enough. Becca and I had been sitting around our filthy Chicago apartment dreaming for months. We were 19, living above Phyllis’ Musical Inn at 1800 West Division Street. It started simply enough "I wonder what it’s like in…?" and "Let’s go to …"

Four years later, here we were, living out our adventurous European backpacking dream — and everything went wrong. In Istanbul, my ATM card stopped working and my bank told me I had to come in ‘in person’ to fix the error. My phone card stopped working because my deadbeat live-in boyfriend forgot to pay the bill.

Then there was Turkish Air. We had a near-death $39 flight from Istanbul to Amsterdam. We held hands because we were convinced that we were going to die. The plane made terrible noises and shook, the passengers were prostrate in the aisles praying, we made 2 unscheduled stops.

We drank too much in Barcelona the night before we took a train so slow we could have gotten out and walked faster. Hung over, we shared a cabin with two Moroccan women who walked around the train with their tops off and brought creepy guys back with them. They filled the walkway with piles of carved wooden gazelles. The next day, in Madrid, we got food poisoning from some bad mayonnaise,and spent the rest of that night lying in our train beds, sweating, and getting up to vomit.

We missed trains, we fled from a youth hostel in Germany because the townspeople were mean to us. But, standing on the train tracks, Becca going back to Greece — because her airline wouldn’t let her fly from anywhere else — at the end of our adventure through Greece Turkey, Italy, Switzerland, France, Spain and Holland, we had made it through.

And we still liked being together. After 24 hours seven days a week together for months, dealing with the stress of traveling but also having a ball, cruising through every major museum in Europe and tromping miles each day looking for vegetarian food, we still liked being together. When the train pulled away I felt more alone that I have ever felt in my life. I was on my own in a foreign land. No Becca to help me decipher shampoo bottles and wade through the streets aimlessly, clutching a tattered map.

It’s been five years since that trip, and a lot has changed since then. We’ve fought — then didn’t talk to each other for 2 years — we’ve been roommates and not roommates and have survived our own and each others’ terrible boyfriends. She’s living a thousand miles away now, getting ready to go to law school. I’ve got a house and a husband and a career. We’ve grown up.

My mom always told me I’d ‘look back on that trip and be happy that we did it while we were young.’ I’m just amazed that, at 29, I’m already nostalgic. That life has already gotten so complicated that it’s hard to get time away, to spend 3 months roaming the earth with your best friend, especially when nothing else could ever be so much fun.