I don’t regret travelling the summer of 2016 with my girlfriend at the time and bringing my relatively new smartphone. We did a long road trip in an old car with well over 200,000 miles on it through the United States from the west coast to the east coast. Then, we travelled to Mexico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama. The entire trip was about two months long.

Writing about it in hindsight, I’m omitting a lot of details for the sake of brevity, but what made it feel like such a risk at the time is what brings it to mind now. I was fresh out of college, having only ventured out of the US once before in a short trip across the Mexican border. My mom was worried and scared me about possible threatening situations I could be exposed to in foreign countries, especially Nicaragua. I barely spoke Spanish, and the whole experience was quite new to me.

To be real, I probably don’t regret it as much as I probably would have if something terrible happened. The smartphone may have saved us when we first landed in Costa Rica and cluelessly got a ride with a suspicious business. Those initial fears very well could have happened, and the fact that they didn’t I see as a blessing.