Here & There: My Experience Dirtbagging

Chronicles of my times in Arizona and traveling up the coast of Portugal.

In the third grade I had a teacher I did not like. During one assignment, we all had to write what we wanted to do when we grew up. On the small piece of paper I wrote “live in my car with my dog and dirtbag around the world.” She took one look at the sentence, laughed, and told me that wasn’t a real job. For the rest of my life, I have actively worked to prove her wrong.

It started my freshman year of college. If you didn’t know, I am a COVID college baby. That means my senior year of high school was cut short due to COVID’s appearance in March, and that my freshman year was unconventional. Although my mom often says my college experience would be unconventional even if COVID didn’t happen. I lived in Arizona the second semester of my freshman year while doing online school from a community college that was definitely not in Arizona, but the school and my teachers didn’t know. A Zoom login and the bedroom wall behind me doesn’t give a lot of location details.

My dad dropped off a car for me in April, and immediately my bedroom switched from the four walls inside my apartment to the backseat of the Toyota Highlander. One was a trip to San Diego to photograph surfers. It was March and, from my limited knowledge of Southern California, extremely cold. I thought I was going to a tropical paradise, so I didn’t pack very well for this trip. However, I did get to sit on the beach with my feet buried in the sand (to keep them warm) and take photos of the surfers who ventured out with wetsuits into the cold ocean. Later in my college experience, it was those surfing pictures that stood out to the head of creative content for a professional soccer team that agreed to let me photograph them, as he recognized the San Diego waves as a place he used to live.

The second defiance to that 3rd grade teacher came very closely after the first. My older brother, Caden, drove with me to the Grand Canyon to go hiking and explore Northern Arizona. My parents were a bit perturbed with us on this trip, as Caden left to visit me five days after returning home from four months in Egypt. We both slept in the back of the car during this trip as well, and solidified the fact that we both already knew well – Walmart parking lots are very comfortable. The first night we slept in a parking lot right outside the Grand Canyon, the second in a Walmart parking lot, and the third in the parking lot of a car mechanic company.

That third night was the worst. We had found a blog saying this company lets you sleep in their parking lot, so Caden decided that was the way to go. As the little sister, despite now being 18 years old, I got very little say in the plans being made. It was very hot that night, as we had moved further south by then, and Caden refused to let me crack the windows because he didn’t want mosquitos getting in. Also unlike the Walmart parking lots, this car mechanic didn’t have a bathroom I could go into late in the night to pee before going to bed. At 9:30pm when we started getting ready for bed, I asked Caden if he would drive me down the street to the grocery store to pee. He said he didn’t think we should move the car from the spot. I asked if he would walk there with me. He refused. So in the dark in the late hours of the night, I wandered down a four lane street by myself into a sketchy grocery store. When I got back and told him fables of someone following me and having to run away to lose them he replied, with his eyes still closed, “Well you better not have led them back to the car, I don’t want someone waking me up in the middle of the night banging on the windows.” I kept waking up throughout the night from nightmares of a worker at the mechanic company putting our car, with us in it, in the car shredder. 

The next morning, at a ripe 5:30am in the morning, Caden flicked me in the forehead to wake me up in a jolt saying, “What are you laughing about?” It was that night that I was told that I giggle in my sleep. After the violent flick to my glabella, I didn’t really fall back asleep. Instead, Caden made me drive him to get breakfast while he stayed laying down in the back.

Except for the normal nagging from my older brother, the trip was nice, and prepared me for my next trip with Lennon. We took a week to drive from Phoenix to St. Louis, MO, spending most of our time in Colorado.

We slept in a different city every night, most of the time in our hammocks. We didn’t expect it to be quite as cold in Colorado as it was in late May, and we also didn’t realize how cold our butts would be in the hammocks. I suppose we never took those, “bridges ice faster than roads” signs very seriously or else we would have put more thought into this. I had just been living in Phoenix, so I didn’t have a winter coat or many warm clothes. Most nights, I ended up sleeping with my shoes on for warmth, and two pairs of socks on my hands since I didn’t have gloves. I wrapped myself in the comforter from my bed I was bringing home when I moved out so that I was inside of a black puffy burrito so my back wasn’t as cold. Other than hammocking, one night there weren't any trees near our campsite so we pitched the tent and slept in there. One night we stayed with Lennon’s aunt and uncle in Denver in their guest house. 

This was later in the week, where we had gone five days without showering, only eating peanut butter sandwiches and clementines, and sleeping outside. When her aunt and uncle brought us into their warm home, fed us a meal that satisfied every stipulation about food groups and quantity, let us both shower and wash our hair, and gave us a king sized bed to sleep in, we didn’t know how to act. We were laughing in high pitched giggles, and we kept calling ourselves “squirmy worms” then flailing around under the sheets. It was very soon after that we completely passed out and remained that way until 9am the next morning, excited to brush our teeth in an actual bathroom instead of using a water bottle and spitting into a bush.

There was also one night where we decided it was a good idea to, at 10pm, start to drive across the entirety of Kansas during a severe thunderstorm.

In retrospect, it was probably the best option despite what our parents told us when we were sitting at a gas station in Goodland, Kansas at 10pm telling them we were just going to drive the five and half hour drive to Kansas City.

We were supposed to spend the night in Goodland, the western-most city in Kansas, then spend the next day driving to Kansas City where we would spend our last night in the condo of my mother’s friend. When we got to Goodland from our time in Utah though, a thunderstorm was starting. We either would have to pitch a tent and hope for the best in the hail and lighting, or sleep upright in the two front seats of the car, as all of the things from my apartment were in the backseat. After looking at the radar, we decided that we could outrun the storm and get to Kansas City where we knew we had an actual house to sleep in. We convinced our parents that we weren’t tired, and that it was the best option.

The golf-ball sized hail started about 20 minutes after we left Goodland. We had to stop under an underpass for a while with another car waiting for it to pass. If you’ve never driven through Kansas before, it’s pretty much exactly as you would imagine. Long stretches with absolutely nothing around, and then a little town comes up from out of nowhere. During those long stretches, it was completely pitch black. There was no moon, street lamps, or any other cars around. We couldn’t see anything except the 40 yards in front of us that were illuminated by our headlights, in the brightest setting. So we drove those 40 yards, then the next 40 yards, and then the next until we would reach the next town and be able to see a bit more. It was still pouring down rain and lighting and thundering for the first half of the drive. Even when the severe weather stopped (because at some point we did end up outrunning the storm) it was still extremely cloudy and we drove the whole way only seeing those 40 yards in front of us. I’m not sure what we would have done if we had to sit through that magnitude of a storm at the campsite, my family’s tent had already been through one tornado camping trip, I’m not sure it could go through another. But that’s a story for another time.

We arrived at my mom’s friend’s house at 3am and went to bed without speaking. Luckily, the friend was out of town that weekend so our late, or early, entrance didn’t disturb her. We woke up the next morning to a perfect blue sky and played frisbee in a common ground for a while before driving the easy four hours to St. Louis.

That was the last of my big camping and dirtbagging trips for a while, as I started my sophomore year at a real university in which I had to be in class every day and couldn’t attend just from a Starbucks in another city while traveling. The sedentary style of living definitely got to me, so when I went to Madrid the fall of my junior year to study abroad, I was ready to make the most of my experience.

With the rigorous school I attended, this mostly came as weekend trips to different cities that didn’t exactly qualify as dirtbagging. But then, in the final weeks of my stay, the school gives students a week off as reading days to prepare for finals. Four days before that first day, I finally made the decision that I didn’t need to be in my apartment in Madrid to study, I could do it anywhere. So while I was sitting in a common room at the university before class, I planned out my next dirtbagging trip – buses up the coast of Portugal.

That afternoon I found, and booked, all of the train and bus rides I would need, and found hostels in each city. Since it was December and the peak travel season for Portugal is obviously the summer, most of the cheapest accommodations in each city ended up being fancy hotels that were straining for money in the off season.

I left on Friday morning on a train taking me from Madrid to Seville to start out my trip in one last Spanish town. It was a 2.5 hour train ride in which I was in a seat facing two other people and spent the majority of the time trying not to make eye contact with them, and trying to pop my ears as we went in and out of the mountains. I could walk from the train depot to my hostel, where I would be staying in a four-person all female room in the heart of the city. I was there for two nights, and the first night I was completely alone in the room. It was probably one of my favorite hostels from my time traveling around Western Europe, and not because I got the room entirely to myself. The drawers already had locks on them, every bed had curtains shielding you from the rest of the room, a little nightstand to put things on, and enough outlets that I could charge my phone, computer, and camera battery at the same time. There was also a nice community, and at one point I was watching Australia play in the World Cup with multiple people from Sydney while sitting in the common area.

I saw all the big tourist places in Seville, like the city center, Plaza de Espana, the Cathedral, and Setas de Sevilla. Seville makes a big deal about sustainable living, so both days I got around primarily by riding one of the city bikes that have stations all over the city. Despite having some trouble with going down one way streets or not being able to ride on cobblestone, it was a great experience. The second night it was raining, and I spent the night watching “Wednesday” which had just recently been released, with some other people from the hostel.

I had to be gone early the next morning, as a bus would take me from Seville to start my journey through Portugal. I took an Uber from my hostel to the bus depot, and I spoke in Spanish with my driver in a way that I could not do when I first arrived in Madrid off the plane. It was easy conversation, and he told me I needed to return in April to partake in the big celebrations.

Albufeira, Portugal was my next stop. The southern coast of Portugal, known for incredible summer vacation destinations with some of the best beaches in the world. People from all over flock to the city to enjoy the sights and weather. In December, it was pretty empty. My brother recently started dating this girl from Portugal he met while she was studying for a semester in the US. They’re still dating to this day, somehow, from across the world. She told me that the Portuguese always make fun of the people from Britain who come to the southern Portuguese beaches and immediately get extremely burnt by calling them steaks because they’re so red.

A little after I got back to Madrid from Portugal, Caden ended up taking The Girlfriend down to Texas on a little road trip. On the way back they made an unexpected stop in a different town and instead of booking a new hotel, they slept in a Walmart parking lot. I guess the dirtbagging runs in the family. Later, when I met her over winter break, she said she enjoyed it. I’m not sure if she would ever allow him to make her do something like that again, though.

I arrived in Albufeira pretty early, and spent the majority of that day walking around the city and on the beach. I took off my shoes and walked in the sand, despite it being 50 degrees outside and windy. It reminded me of that day sitting on the coast in San Diego with my feet buried in the cold, wet sand. The town was hilly, and I walked up and down those hills with my camera like the clouds above weren’t threatening to absolutely pour down on me. There were a number of bluffs that jetted out over the beach and ocean, and walking along the cliffs I decided to scramble up one very high, precarious bluff that went up higher than the one’s surrounding it. I left my phone behind to record either a pretty sight, or me slipping to my demise on the slippery mud. Since I am here to write about it today, I did not slip.

At the farthest point from my hotel, I was walking down a street taking pictures of a restaurant when a man came out of the establishment as he saw me. He came running out yelling, “Baby, come eat here, come on baby”, beckoning me to come inside while making smooching sounds with his lips, blowing me air kisses. That’s when I decided that maybe I had ventured too far from the tourist destinations, and maybe I should high tail it back to the hotel and find something around there. I ran away giggling, hoping that he would not follow me. I think the laughing might have hurt his feelings, because he went back in and slammed the door. I picked up pasta and cheesecake on the way back to my room as the rain started with a slight mist and was pouring by the time I entered the lobby. If there’s one thing about Portugal in December, it’s going to rain.

That is when I returned to my hotel and found myself locked out of my room. You know the story from there.

The thing about dirtbagging using public transportation is that as the traveler, you have no control over when the bus that is supposed to take you from one destination to another arrives. No control over if the bus even comes at all. Everything over the loudspeakers was only repeated in Portuguese, which I didn’t think would be a problem. I knew the Portuguese word for “Lisbon”, all I had to do was listen for Lisboa, then get on the bus. The buses were also all labeled at the top with their destination. I wasn’t worried. I was supposed to depart at 8:30am, but when it got to 9:30am and no Lisbon bus had arrived, I started to think I got something wrong. I went up to the desk to ask for help, to which the attendant yelled at me, “Go away!”

That was it, I was going to be stuck in Albufeira, Portugal for the rest of my life. How do I get out of this city? I calmed down a bit, and noticed there was another, older, Portuguese woman huffing around upset and figured she was probably also upset about the lack of bus. I approached her, said “excuse me” in Portuguese, then proceeded to ask her if she spoke English. She didn’t speak a lot, but we could understand each other well enough to get the point across. We were both supposed to be on a bus to Lisbon, but that was not happening. She said to me, “I help, I am your mother now.” From that moment on, I had a new adoptive mother. (This is an even funnier occurrence if you know about my adoptive Spanish father, I must seem like a very adoptable person.) She grabbed my wrist and took me up to the desk attendant as they both yelled at each other in Portuguese. Finally the attendant said something agreeable, and she guided me to sit next to her and said, “Wait here.”

An hour later, she got up and ushered me to come with her. A bus had just arrived with a different destination flashing on the top. There were a number of other upset people, seemingly who had also been waiting for the Lisbon bus, trying to get on this one, which was already almost full. The woman pushed her way to the front and brought me with her, getting on the bus in front of everyone else. I sat down where she told me to sit. The doors closed and I still wasn’t exactly sure where the bus was exactly taking me, as it was headed for a different city. But when I leaned over to my adoptive mother sitting across the aisle from me and said, “Lisboa?” she just replied, “Yes.” So I trusted her.

Two hours later, my mother grabs my arm again. I look outside and we’re crossing a bridge that looks an awful lot like the one in San Francisco. “Lisboa” she says, motioning out the window with a smile. From what I can gather, Lisbon was on the way to the actual destination of the bus, and they took a few people and dropped us off in the middle of Lisbon as a favor. I’m still not sure what happened to our bus, but this was also acceptable. My mother and a few other people got off the bus with me in Lisbon, she hugged me and said, “Enjoy, American” before walking off and leaving me to my Google Maps to find my hostel.

The Lisbon hostel was also one of my favorites, as there was a huge lobby, and a big common area on the roof looking out over Lisbon, and a TV playing the World Cup games. I did some work sitting up there, even studied a little! But mostly I walked around the town. Caden’s Girlfriend goes to school outside of Lisbon and had given me some recommendations, saying she missed Lisbon during Christmas Time. There was a mall decorated for the holidays, a Christmas market with gifts and candy, and the big Praça do Comércio Christmas tree lit up in front of the lookalike San Francisco bridge. I did some thrift shopping in Lisbon as well, and it quickly became one of my favorite cities I had traveled to. Madrid, Paris, and Lisbon are my first string starters.

I spent two days in Lisbon and almost decided not to leave since I was enjoying it so much. The only bad thing that happened to me in Lisbon was getting stuck in the hostel elevator with a man, but that was alleviated quickly because he also did not want to be stuck in the elevator with me, so he pried the doors open.

I was excited for my next destination though, as Nazare has the biggest waves in the world and hosts a world renowned surfing competition every year. I had brought my 70-200mm lens in my suitcase in hopes to get at least a few pictures of people surfing. If you’ve been here for a while, you know what happened in Nazare. I stood on the beach, looked out on the water, and it was completely and absolutely still. Not even a little Florida-sized wave. Two of my roommates had been earlier in the season and saw huge waves. I was grumpy. But I stayed, and I rode the Nazare tram, and I ended up having a good time. Except when I got caught in the rain without an umbrella the next morning and had to use the hairdryer on my pants. When in Portugal!

I stayed in Nazare for a night, and it rained the entire night. I was scared to open my blinds in the morning because I thought the ocean might have overflowed and was going to flood the whole town. It had not, and the ocean was still completely still.

It rained the entire trip from Nazare to Porto, and continued to rain while I sat in my hotel room, exhausted, gazing out the window. The rain was kind of nice though. I was averaging 12 miles a day of walking, and my legs were starting to give out on me. The rain gave me an excuse to sit in my hotel room and write, something I never do when I arrive in a new city. But the rain eventually stopped, and my clothes dried out, and so I put on my tennis shoes and set off walking. I understand now why people say Porto is the prettiest city in Portugal, the architecture mixed in with the nature was gorgeous, and the view from the Dom Luís bridge was like nothing I had seen before. I was in Porto for less than 24 hours, but a lot can happen in that short period of time.

Porto was the last city, which meant when I woke up the next morning, I was heading to the train station to take my 8 hour trip back to Madrid. It seemed like a long time, but I prefer riding the train over flying, and it gave me 8 hours of uninterrupted time to write and work on the photo book I was making for my dad for Christmas. It was also nice to sit, in my lounge pants, for such a long period of time without feeling like I needed to get up and explore more of the city. All I could do was sit back, eat my sandwich and chips, work on my book, watch the movie playing on the car TV, and look out the window at the countryside of Portugal and Spain. It was my last day of relaxing before I spent the weekend at the library in Parque Del Retiro studying for my finals.

This whole thing has been a story about dirtbagging and traveling, but really it’s a story about freedom and documenting the world as I see it. Because I could read countless blogs or books or look at photographs of these places, but there is no better way to truly understand the world than by retelling the stories that we have experienced in the world. Walking around a new city with my camera, reflecting on and writing about my experiences afterwards, sleeping in my car in mundane parking lots in eccentric cities, and meeting interesting people along the way all forces me to pay attention, and there is ecstasy in that act.

Maybe I’ve been doing this my whole life to rebel against my third grade teacher’s statement, but there are a lot of other versions of myself who also need the reassurance. When I was in the middle of my two-year long head injury recovery process, I went to a therapist. She gave me homework to think about and bring in the next week – “If you could have anything in the world, if you could design your own life, what would you have?” The next Monday I came to her with just one word written down in my notebook – “freedom.”

When I am traveling around the world, around the country, even around the state that I live in, for the cheapest amount of money possible, the only luxury I have is freedom. Which is really the only luxury I have ever needed.

Yours truly,

Calihan