I was twenty one, weeks out of college, and I left the only life I'd ever known like it was nothing. (It was not nothing. I just didn't know that yet.)

Six of us went on work abroad visas, because that's what you do at twenty one when you're terrified of turning into someone with a real job. We landed in London, worked in Glasgow, then washed up at a idillic resort hotel in the actual middle of nowhere, Crieff, population: sheep. Every spare pound went straight into backpacking across the UK and into Europe.

No cell phones. A phone call home once a week if we found a booth and had the spare change. Completely cut off from everything familiar. Completely, gloriously addicted to what that disconnection made possible.

Scotland is the reason I fell in love with travel in the first place. Not gently. It cracked something open and left the hinges broken.

It's my heart place. Spectacularly gorgeous, thick with history, thicker with ghosts, thick with soul I can still feel from here. The kind of country that gets under you and never fully leaves.

This time I came back with a camera instead of a backpack, my favorite travel group in tow instead of five broke twenty-somethings. Not chasing a paycheck. Chasing the memories Same country. Different me. Same feeling underneath it all, it turns out some things just fully become part of you.