Went on a 3 week long trip to the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Norway and Denmark with my girlfriend. The majority of the time was spent in Norway and one night we took a gondola to the top of a mountain to watch some kind of show. I don’t remember if it was a laser show, concert or what, but when it was over, as you can imagine there was a very long line to take the gondola back down. Not liking to wait so long we noticed that there were a number of people heading down the mountain, on foot. So we followed them. What could possibly go wrong? I mean it’s a mountain. . . in town. . . All you have to do is go down and eventually you’ll be back in town, right.

I started to get a little warm, so I took off my leather jacket and carried it in my arms. This is when I found out that even a 5 pound load can get heavy if you carry it long enough. Also, downhill, while easier than up hill, still isn’t easy. It took forever and when we finally spilled out onto the street, we were in a completely unknown area. We’d somehow circled partly around the mountain and come out a different side. All of the people we were following had magically disappeared, like in the movies when the Vietnamese just step off into the forest before the bombs start falling on the soldiers.

We found ourselves standing in what appeared to be a suburban neighborhood. No one on the streets. No cars. No taxis. It was late and there were no busses running as far as we could tell. We had no idea how to get back to where we were staying. We didn’t really speak the language. At that point we just looked at each other and said, “How did we get into this situation?”

In the end we found a bus terminal with a driver sitting in his bus, after his shift. We asked him and he told us which bus was still running and heading our way and that we couldn’t get on at the terminal. The funny thing is when we finally boarded the bus, the driver was one of the passengers.

Not exactly, but pretty close, at least for me. 6 years ago, I nonchalantly asked my boss if I can relocate to another country. He’s pretty cool so he was like, sure. The hard part was getting his boss, and his boss’ boss to say yes, because it takes money and a lot of other resources to move an employee from a low-cost country to a high-cost country. By some miracle, everyone said yes. It was so fast that when the director talked to me, he asked me where I wanted to go (global company with offices all over the world), and I answered “I don’t know, I didn’t think I’d get this far”.

Fast forward to today and I now have permanent residency. Sometimes when I’m just chilling, it hits me and I still can’t believe I’m here now, with what started as a random throwaway question.

Back in the 90s my father to us on ski trip to the Rockies. We grew up in the midwest, and even though snowboards were still new, we were masters of the tiny mounds we call ski hills in Wisconsin.

Before he would let us go on our own, my dad insisted we take a lesson. When the instructor asked what we wanted to learn, I said “Jumping cliffs and tree skiing”.

We went up the highest lift, and then proceeded to hike another half hour. Well above the tree line, on a narrow ridge, the instructor stops, straps in, and says we are dropping in here. He asks one last time if this is what we want to do, then he went off the damned cliff.

So now my brother and I, both teenagers from Chicago, are alone on the top of this mountain watching our guide shrink off in the distance.

We looked at each other in disbelief, and realised we were either doing this, or walking another half hour back down without a guide.

Strapping in and psyching myself up to push off into what seemed like open sky was maybe the biggest “Wait, how the hell did I end up in this situation” moments of my life.