When in Spain, roll with the punches

I stepped off the bus from the airport into downtown Barcelona, yawning and stretching theatrically after my 6:30 a.m. flight from Rome.

I didn't have a place to stay or even a map.

But I wasn't worried -- it was just another day in another city in what was beginning to feel like an endless circuit of the European continent. By this point, nearly three months into my travels, after seedy hostels, marginally edible and overpriced cuisine, and countless subway transfers, I felt I could handle anything. I was about to be put to the test.

As I walked over to a group of kids I'd met on the bus, coveting their copy of The Lonely Planet every step of the way, I patted my rear to feel for my wallet, as I'd gotten accustomed to doing periodically. It was gone. I checked again. It was still gone. Suddenly my safety-pats seemed like a futile gesture.

This is when I freaked out.

I ran back onto the bus, told the driver I was minus a wallet and searched the place high and low, all to no avail. One of the baggage handlers flagged down a police car, and after a frustrating conversation in half Spanish and half English, the officers and I came to the mutual understanding that they were going to be absolutely no help. Desperate, I got back on the bus to try to convince the driver to return me to the airport to search for the wallet, and then realized it was a different bus than I'd arrived on.

Things were looking pretty grim: I was alone; I was running on two hours of sleep; I was starving and had no food. I had 1.60 Euro to my name and no credit cards.

After I'd subdued my racing internal monologue -- consisting of "what do I do?" punctuated with swear words -- I calmed down and realized I wasn't alone in Barcelona after all. I'd met an Australian at my hostel in Rome who lived in Barcelona, and she'd written down a list of things to see and do and appended her phone number as an afterthought. I spent my last Euro calling her from a payphone, praying that she would pick up and, to my almost tearful relief, she did.

The Australian, Kyleigh, saved me by loaning me money and finding me a place to stay and giving me a phone card so I could call my bank and cancel credit cards. She even took me out to dinner with her friends. She was an angel.

Sitting in my run-down pension that night, I reviewed what had happened to me in the past 24 hours: I'd been forcefully ejected from an airport terminal with about 20 other hostel-less travelers trying to sleep there as well. I'd been robbed. I'd spent two hours strapped into a jet surrounded by the noisy antics of a painfully Midwestern family. There was a man yelling very loudly in Spanish right outside my window.

None of these factors could explain the buoyant happiness I felt. Kyleigh's afternoon of kindness overshadowed the mishaps easily.

Throughout my adventures in Europe, I found that my happiness was much less dependent on the things that happened to me than on how I viewed them. Being able to laugh over the theft of my wallet on the same day it was stolen wasn't easy but it was better than any alternative.

I could handle anything after all -- but it wasn't so much a matter of how I corrected the crises as how much I allowed them to affect me.

Then again, the whole "lost wallet" thing didn't seem as funny the other night in Seattle after getting turned away from a bar. I hope the thief is making good use of my driver's license.