On Wenceslas Square we saw a man playing a makeshift instrument, a table top criss-crossed with piano wire. The man bent over the wires and tapped them with a wooden mallet. Two dreadlocked backpackers leaned over the wires too, grinning and nodding like this unremarkable plunking was brilliant.

I never got to be a backpacker. I likely would have jumped in the wrong jeep on the promise of an unexplored waterfall and ended up dead or pregnant. My thirty-something self doesn’t trust my early twenty-something self to buy a Euroline pass and crash in cheap hostels. I know the messes I made, sans language barrier.

But.

Backpacker culture intrigues me. I like the range of it. I like the girls in flowy skirts and the boys with shaggy hair. I like the just going part. Here, I’ve seen graying men shoulder packs and lean into the uphill walk.

My first impression of backpacker culture was when Justin and I went to Taganga on the Colombian Caribbean coast. It was hot, but I ran every morning, chased by dogs, to Santa Marta and back. We laid around on the beach, drinking beer and reading paperbacks. I ate the best coconut pie I’ve ever had at a place called La Ballena Azul and went back twice more just for the pie. I felt very alive, walking up rutted gravel paths in the dark, my belly full of pie, swatting bugs I couldn’t see, nearly tripping over lazy dogs.

I was twenty-six. Around me were men and women a few years younger, scuffed packs at their feet, sheens of sweat on their skin. I remember eating ceviche one night, watching a young woman on the porch hold court, three or four men trying. What I remember best are her bare legs and feet. She had dancer legs she stretched out then pulled to her chest, flopped open like butterfly wings. The men laughed at what she said and she laughed at what they said and they all took pulls on sweating beers. There was possibility and sex in her smile and splayed legs, in the men’s ropey arms resting on chair backs.

One day we went to Tyrona, got caught in Biblical rain and hiked out in heavy boots. We boarded a full bus, the few backpackers on board wearing our own exhaustion. Even that travel-worn posture was enviable. I wanted to be mistaken for a backpacker, wide open to what comes, a little weary after. I wanted to seem like the kind of person who would just leave their country to go see what South America was like in November.

I felt late to my adventure. I felt a little planned. I had a husband and a job. Within a year, I’d have a baby. Sitting in that restaurant, eating ceviche scooped from a plastic bucket, watching a girl get all the flattery I craved, I thought I should have gone when I first felt it. But then I’d be dead now, or parenting an adolescent itching for his or her own adventure.