The Start of Something Bigger

It started in my parents’ kitchen. Brian was on the computer. I don’t remember what I was doing, just there, hanging around on a normal day.

Then he said it: “Want to go to Ireland?”

He was looking at flights. That was it. No plan. No long talk. Just a question.

Naturally, I said yes.

And just like that, everything changed.

We were off. We ended up doing six countries: Ireland, Italy, France, Austria, Switzerland, and Germany. But it didn’t feel like a checklist. It felt like we were just moving, following whatever came next.

I remember getting off the plane in Ireland and walking into the airport. I stopped. Reality hit me. I had crossed an ocean!

We stayed in hostels. At first, we thought we had made a mistake. We watched too many movies and we let our imaginations get carried away. But then we woke up the next day. Still there. Still good. And we realized how perfect the trip was. Everything was alright. We figured it out.

Simple. Cheap. Full of people just like us: travelers, explorers, people figuring things out as they went.

We ate a lot of peanut butter and jelly, saved money where we could, and spent it where it mattered.

We met people everywhere. Conversations that started out of nowhere and stayed with us until this very day. Moments that didn’t feel big at the time, but lingered with us over the next two decades.

There were little nuggets along the way.

One of us had our chocolate Minstrels eaten by an old man on a bus heading to the Cliffs of Moher. We scuba dove off the coast of Nice. Had crepes under the Eiffel Tower. Parachuted off the Swiss Alps.

One of us relieved ourselves in a Venetian woman’s garden after too much wine as she yelled from above in Venice. We met a specialist baker in Rome who was extremely friendly, and he gave us free pastries. We will have to tell you that story in person. We stood inside the Colosseum and tried to picture what it used to be like as a gladiator. We would both be gladiators, obviously. We listened to a classical concert in Austria.

None of it felt forced. It just happened organically.

Looking back, it feels like a blur, but also clear at the same time. Like those moments got stamped somewhere permanently in our minds, not just on our passports.

That trip changed something. Not all at once. Not in a big, obvious way. But it shifted how we saw things. It showed us what was possible, what we wanted.

That day in my parents’ kitchen wasn’t just a random question. It was the start of something I didn’t yet know or understand.

That trip set us on a path. And somehow, it led here: sitting in a hotel room in Kyoto, writing this on my phone, thinking about how one simple “yes” can carry you further than you expect.

That trip didn’t just take us to Europe. It was a nudge. A spark.

Looking back now, I think we both felt it, even if we didn’t say it out loud.

It wasn’t just the start of a trip.

It was the start of something bigger.

It was the start of Bromaad.

~Shaun S.