CONTEST: The winner of romantic travel stories – We met at a hostel in Rome

By Alyssa and John Dunn of Decatur

The most romantic travel story for my husband and I happened, in fact, before we were even husband and wife! I was 20, having just studied abroad in Paris, and was traveling with a friend around Europe. John had just graduated from college and was also doing the grand European tour with a friend. I was from Connecticut and went to school in Boston. He was from Baltimore and was starting school at Emory in the fall. Needless to say, our paths never would have crossed in the U.S.

But thankfully, we did cross paths, in Rome, Italy. We both ended up at the same hostel in Rome at the same time. The hostel itself, near the train station, was very dirty and filled with college students drinking their way through the continent. I was not enjoying our stay there at all. But then, one evening, after a long day of sightseeing, my friends and I happened upon John and his friend eating in the communal kitchen. They seemed nice enough, so we sat down to join them. We talked for a long time, and I remember thinking that it was terribly unfortunate to meet such a wonderful guy all the way in Rome.

The next day, we had to go our separate ways. We exchanged e-mail addresses, but I didn’t think anything would come of it. However, when I moved back to Boston in the fall, in a strange twist of events, John’s best friend moved in down the street! We spent all fall going to football games together while the one I really liked was beginning graduate school thousands of miles away in Atlanta. Thankfully, John came to visit that January, when we had only been communicating by e-mail for six months. It was just as wonderful and comfortable as the first time we met in Rome. It was as if we’d known each other our whole lives. But we were so far apart!

Then, in a leap of faith, I applied to and was accepted to graduate school at Emory as well. Though I was planning on going to Harvard, there was something even stronger calling me in the South, and that was my future husband. I moved across the country for a man I’d met completely by chance in a horribly sketchy hostel in Rome. Now, five years later, we are happily married and enjoy reminiscing about our happenstance meeting.

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