Ever since I was younger, I knew that I wanted to spend a large part of my adulthood traveling. As a child, family vacations mainly consisted of annual trips to the Cape, where we would spend weeks at the beach. On occasion, we would travel to Florida or North Carolina to visit extended family, but all of these travels took place via minivan. Being stuffed with five suitcases and my siblings in the back of a car while driving for 22 hours straight was not exactly something that I envisioned myself pursuing again in the future. Last month, I traveled off of the east coast for the first time without my family to attend a bachelorette party in Scottsdale, Arizona.
It is crazy to think that as a 21-year-old, I had never stepped foot on a plane before, considering that some people have to travel monthly for work and other excursions. I partook on this journey with five other girls who all rallied together to make this the best bachelorette party for one of our good friends. Before boarding the plane, I was a little nervous (who wouldn’t be?), but I was also super excited to see what I had been missing out on all of these years. My friends laughed at how amazed I was by all of the airport kiosks and how excited I was to try airplane food, which wasn’t as great as I anticipated it to be. Watching movies and playing games on the personal televisions was honestly one of my favorite parts of the trip.
Once we landed, we headed straight to our Airbnb, which was equipped with board games, foosball tables, swimming pools, and absolutely everything one would need to entertain themselves for a weekend. If you couldn’t guess, this was also my first time staying at an Airbnb, and I also got chauffeured by my first Uber.
Over the weekend, my friends and I got a taste of life out West. We hiked around a beautiful trail where we were surrounded by a landscape of cacti and tall mountains. We also spent a lot of time touring downtown Scottsdale and trying out a wide variety of cuisine. Scottsdale is known for hosting bachelorette parties, so a lot of the restaurants provided unique experiences for their parties, such as lighting drinks on fire and incorporating light shows into the meals.
My trip to Scottsdale was one that I will never forget. Not only did I have so much fun celebrating, but I was also able to participate in a lot of new and exciting experiences, such as flying for the first time. Plane rides, Ubers, and Airbnbs sound rather mundane to the wide majority of people, but it is important to make the most out of every experience presented to you and to be grateful for those opportunities, no matter how small. I am eager to plan more vacations in the future, and I can now feel confident in my ability to properly navigate through an airport.
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