Episode 1: Jesse

Photo: Daniel Xu

We were almost in Italy and we picked up some groceries from the store. It was around six and we were a bit worried we wouldn’t find a place to sleep. My friend was like Yeah – we should find a campsite somewhere. I was like No – we’re just going to continue on this road and we’ll camp at some farmer’s place.

So we went up to multiple people and some said no. And then we found these guys who had a tree garden and we asked him if we could put our tent there. It was a beautiful field – in-between these flowers and apple trees and plum trees. And they were kind of scary; they were two guys – one was around fifty and the other was forty-five. They were looking at us and I thought Mm, maybe not but we needed a place to sleep so we did it anyway.

We had dinner. We had mushroom. In a can – which I never eat anymore. And it was alright; we were very tired and she had a headache so we went to bed. We woke up early because it was a heatwave so we usually got up around five and would leave half past five and arrive at our next destination around twelve.

It was a crazy night – we had a really weird conversation and she also had a weird dream. And she told me about this at four so we went back to sleep and she woke up at five. She opens the tent and just vomits in front of our tent – just Eurgh. I thought it was so rude because if I smell vomit I also vomit and I was like Ok – could you turn your head around at least, but she was very ill so it was very rude of me.

But there was this pile of vomit outside our tent, and then I realised that it was in the garden of these guys and it was such a nice place. It looked like a big pile of shit (we also shit in their garden) so not very nice. And it smelled a lot like the mushrooms. But we still had to leave so we got our stuff very quickly – faster than normal because shit what if they find out, and we left.