(Sober Firsts) Airports, Italian Trains and Discovering New Fears After 25 Years Sober

Lisa used to think of airports as "bars with hallways." Anna recently discovered that, after more than 25 years of sobriety, she was still terrified of navigating a foreign country by herself.

Welcome to sober travel, where the challenges apparently never stop evolving.

Lisa takes us back to her first solo business trip, roughly two months after getting sober, when she had to fly to San Francisco for a notoriously booze-soaked law firm retreat. Her survival strategy involved candy, pretzels, trashy magazines, hiding as far from the airport bars as possible and handing the hotel minibar key straight back to the front desk. She also called her sponsor constantly, which turned out to be considerably more helpful than the candy.

Anna's sober travel revelation came much later, during a recent trip to Italy. Despite having traveled extensively, she'd never fully appreciated how much she relied on other people to handle the logistics. Suddenly she was alone in Rome, trying to find the right train to Florence and discovering that being a successful adult doesn't necessarily mean knowing which Italian train car you're supposed to be in.

The payoff? Arriving in Florence, realizing she'd done it herself and experiencing the particular joy of waking up in a beautiful city with absolutely nobody else's agenda to follow.

We talk about how sobriety keeps offering new firsts, why facing a fear you didn't even know you had can be so satisfying and how travel changes when you're interested in the actual destination rather than where you can get drunk or high.

And in this week's petty resentment, we tackle an important modern etiquette question: If you're having a perfectly good text conversation with someone, what gives them the right to suddenly CALL you?

Seriously. Who agreed to that?