I am enroute to BornHack, an annual 7-day long Hacker Camp on the island of Fyn, Denmark. This year I am intentionally planning to meet and coordinate travel with three other friends, in addition to the larger groups of friends and acquaintances I will be camping with and near all week. Two of us, Sky and I, are actually arriving early to help with the build-up before the event. This will be her second BornHack and my third. Another friend will arrive Wednesday for her first BornHack, and a final friend on Friday for his second. And yet, I am traveling alone right now.

Flights didn’t line up well with cost for Sky to end up on the same plane with me from Chicago, so we are both following different itineraries to get us to Copenhagen. I’ll be laying over in Philadelphia shortly, meanwhile Sky is enroute to Toronto. We will converge in CPH, hopefully, within about an hour of each other and continue our journey that started about a mile apart together, after a diverging start. On the way back, our paths will also separate. Sky will return home, while another friend and I possibly together or possibly sequentially make our way to Helsinki, Finland. From there, I will leave him and fly directly to Osaka, while he will explore a few days before returning home to Philadelphia, where he will have left from a few days after I passed through going the same direction.

My journey takes me around the world, completing my circumnavigation with visits to Busan and Seoul, South Korea, before returning home via Tokyo. I travel solo a lot, more than most humans I’d wager, but I also frequently end up with others along for stretches of my itineraries, overlapping with friends and acquaintances along the way, either in their homes or on their own journeys. I find myself wondering which is better: sliding through connections as I do, sharing moments and making memories with many people in many places but doing so alone, so I alone share the full experience, or having travel companions that share the full experiences, along for the adventure and the ride. I don’t know if there is a right answer, but I look forward to continuing to seek that out, while also continuing to explore the world solo, with the help of my friends.