Uluru, With Friends

Thinking back to this trip fills my heart with warmth.

My partner and I went to Uluru with Charlie and Jesse, and the four of us fit together in a way you don't always get to count on. Charlie and I have known each other for a couple of years. But the four of us together was a new thing — Charlie and Jesse were travelling through Australia, we met up a few times, and somewhere in there it just worked. The two guys didn't know each other at all before this. They could easily have been polite strangers sharing an itinerary. Instead they got on immediately, and the whole trip was easy in the way that only happens when everyone is genuinely glad to be there.

What I keep coming back to is how grateful I am that they wanted us along at all.

At this stage of life, going on holiday with friends is not a given. People have less time, more commitments, lives that have turned inward toward home. And when you have chosen, as we have, to live on the other side of the world from a lot of the people you love, the chances of actually being in the same place, at the same time, with the room to do something like this — they get slim. So when it happens, when four people who don't all know each other end up standing in front of Uluru together and it is just good, you notice it. You hold onto it.

I don't take trips like this for granted anymore. I'm not sure I ever did, but I definitely don't now.

So this is really just a thank you. To Charlie and Jesse, for wanting us there. To my partner, for being the easiest person to travel with. And to whatever combination of timing and distance and luck put the four of us in the same red desert at the same time.

Field of Lights