Everything You Need To Know About Traveling With Boys

When you’ve only traveled with girls, traveling with boys for the first time can be a learning experience!

It was late September in Florence, Italy.  After a month of living, studying and traveling together, my girlfriends and I invited two of our guy friends to join us on a weekend trip to the island of Capri.

In that short trip, I learned everything I needed to know about traveling with boys.  And it was all due to one object:

A ball.

A group of girls would never bring a ball on a trip.  Justin and Steve, however, bought a small plastic ball the moment we touched land.  That ball served as a recurring theme of our weekend and taught us girls everything we needed to know about traveling with boys:

Boys thrive on competition. When two straight guys have a female audience, biological instincts kick in. It wasn’t enough to just throw the ball back and forth.  No, they whipped it at odd angles, hurled it at top speeds, and did everything short of killing each other with that ball, just to trip each other up in front of us!

Boys strike up instant friendships. Forget a common language — a ball is what brings boys together!  As we girls perused the jewelry stores, the guys started a game of keep-away with a few little boys on a piazza.  It was if they had been playing together for years.

Boys live to assert their manhood. By the time Steve jumped over a fence and scaled a steep hill to retrieve the ball after it rolled over the edge, the message was clear: he would do anything to save us damsels, should we ever end up in distress.

What has traveling with the opposite sex taught you?