We had left Buenos Aires with a return date already set. The original plan had been a lot more structured than it ended up being: travel for 90 days, visit a few places, see how it felt to live differently, and then figure out how we wanted to continue from there.
The problem was that, at some point, I started feeling too happy traveling alongside Gonzalo. And when the 90 days were up, we weren't really in the mood for it to end. So we left the Schengen zone and headed to Bosnia. The official reason was the day count. The real one: we wanted to keep going.
Bosnia was part of that extension, and Montenegro would be the last stop before heading back to Buenos Aires. Before leaving, I was very aware of the fear of giving up the stability of a routine I knew. A life that sometimes weighed on me, but one I at least knew how to run. I had schedules, places, a fairly clear idea of what the next day would look like, plus family and friends who feel like family and who I suspected I'd miss terribly.
And I think one of the things I most needed to figure out was whether Gonzalo and I were actually walking toward the same place. Traveling as a couple made that question impossible to avoid. There was no single conversation where we settled it. It was many long conversations about how each of us understood life.
That's actually how we met. When Gonzalo showed up, he had just left his home in Badalona, the place that had been his home for many years, and had put the Tesla in storage before heading back to Buenos Aires. I half-jokingly called him "homeless": my playful way of pointing out that he'd already made the decision to leave everything behind. The joke turned out to be more literal than I realized at the time.
I understood later that the thing that scared me so much was, in fact, a kind of freedom I also wanted to experience.
At this stage we were starting to discover that our reasons for traveling were a lot more alike than we'd imagined. We didn't have all the answers, but we wanted to find them on the road.
It wasn't just about seeing countries anymore. It was about starting to build something together.
What you're reading is part of that.
I wanted to reconnect with my passion for writing and find a way to turn everything I was living into a story, while also starting my own brand and communications consulting business.
Gonzalo had his own projects and his own ways of looking at the world. And, somehow, we started working like two people who pushed each other forward. Sometimes one of us had more energy and the other needed the push. Sometimes it was the other way around. But there was something valuable in discovering that we wanted to build from the same place.
Budva: the last stop before heading back to Buenos Aires
After Bosnia came Budva, our last stop on this extension of the trip that had begun back in December 2025.
It was one of those drives that makes a decision feel especially right. Montenegro kept unfolding in front of us with spectacular mountains dropping into the sea. At some point we pulled over at a spot with an incredible view.
Gonzalo pulled out the drone. The drone is, for him, basically a grown man's toy. And there probably aren't many things that excite him as much as finding a landscape he can fly it over.
He turned into one of those kids trying to get someone's attention: he asked me to make mate. That's when I knew the stop was going to run long. I watched him while I brewed it, thinking that maybe that was also part of our trip: having the time to stop somewhere for no other reason than liking what we were looking at.
There was no obligatory visit. No museum we had to reach before it closed. We could just stop, drink some mate, and keep going. Budva was waiting a few kilometers ahead, and it turned out to be truly beautiful. The heat was already starting to build, and for a few days our life felt simple again: beach, work, and the Adriatic as scenery.
Working with the sea in front of you can sound like one of those things people say they want to do someday, until suddenly there you are: opening your laptop as the heat starts to rise, the water shining, a piña colada showing up on the table, which by then had become my go-to craving.
One afternoon I went out on my own and came across a wedding in Budva. I stood there for a while watching from a distance, like a postcard, without thinking much about anything else.
On another one of those walks I came across a little princess castle, the kind built for kids to play in. It gave me a small wave of nostalgia for the people I loved and didn't have nearby, and that day I thought especially of a friend's youngest daughter. I took a photo and recorded a video to send her. For a moment I wanted to be back in Buenos Aires, sharing those small things I was missing out on.
And at the same time, I didn't want to leave either. I wanted to be there and I wanted to stay here. Sometimes even both at once. I guess that was one of the strangest parts of living through all of it.
The urge to stay wasn't just about Budva anymore. I think it was starting to be about the way of life we were trying out together.
Kotor and Perast: the cats, the wedding, and the walls we still owe ourselves
That way of life also gave us this: one weekend, with no real plan, we hopped in the Tesla to explore Kotor and Perast, two towns on the same bay that looked pulled out of another century. We only had a few hours, so we did what so often happens when you travel: tried to see too much in too little time.
Kotor had me hooked from the moment we walked into the old town. Wandering those stone streets, with the walls climbing up the mountain and the fortress watching over everything from above, made it hard to believe we were standing somewhere with more than 2,100 years of history. And, mixed in with all that history, there were the cats. They were everywhere: in the squares, in the doorways, under the tables, as if the town belonged to them and we were just visiting. We later learned the locals actually look after them, leaving food and water, and there's even a Cats Museum.
At one point a black cat crossed our path. In popular culture that's usually bad luck, but not there: Venice's official symbol, and Venice ruled Kotor for centuries, is a lion, and over time the locals started seeing the cats as a kind of domestic lion. Today they're considered a symbol of prosperity, resilience, and good luck.
Kotor may have walls, churches, and an impressive fortress, but the real owners seemed to be them.
From there we headed to Perast. We walked down to the town church, and right at that moment a wedding was happening. Gonzalo told me a lot of couples go there to get married, and we stood watching from a distance. We ended up talking about what marriage meant to each of us. I had already been married once, though without a party, in the middle of the pandemic. Gonzalo isn't big on religious ceremonies, but he liked the idea of celebrating and committing to someone.
It's hard not to think about my own story when I see something like that. A couple getting married always reminds me that no one walks into a marriage expecting it to end someday, and I didn't either. But sometimes people grow in different directions, and one of the hardest things to grieve is what couldn't be. It's a story I still care about and respect for what it was.
These days I get a lot more excited thinking about what's ahead. About everything Gonzalo and I still get to build together.
Perast welcomed us with that kind of calm that shows up exactly when you know you have to keep moving. Mountains dropping into the water, small islands facing the town, and stone houses we looked at while drinking some mate.
We left with two things still owed to ourselves for next time: climbing Kotor's walls and sitting down for dinner by the water in Perast.
The legend of the Budva ballerina
In Budva there's a ballerina statue that has been looking out at the sea for more than half a century.
We found her on a rock, along the path to Mogren beach. There's a legend that says a young woman used to wait there for the sailor she loved, who had left with a promise to return. She kept coming back to that same spot to watch the horizon until, as the story goes, she died waiting.
It's a romantic story, but while I listened to it I couldn't stop thinking about something else. How strange, to spend so much time waiting for something to come back. Because I was also about to go back, but I was starting to understand that I didn't want to become exactly the same person who had left Buenos Aires a few months earlier.
I had spent a good part of my life building stability, doing what was supposed to make sense, following paths that seemed reasonable. And yet, on that trip I'd discovered something I wasn't even looking for: I liked not knowing exactly what came next.
I liked writing. I liked looking at a landscape and having the time to just stay there. I liked discovering I could live with fewer certainties than I thought I needed.
And, more than anything, I liked this version of myself that showed up whenever I stopped trying to control everything. Maybe that's why the Ballerina stuck with me.
She was looking out at the horizon, waiting for someone to come back. I was starting to look at myself.
I still didn't know what that meant. I didn't know yet how much of that life I wanted to bring back to Buenos Aires and how much I was going to leave behind on the way. But I no longer wanted to wait for the trip to end to find out.
Podgorica and saying goodbye to the Tesla
The trip had a return date. And this time we actually had to respect it. From Budva we headed to Podgorica, and the drive reminded us once again that in Montenegro distances aren't measured only in kilometers. As we moved away from the coast, the road climbed higher and the views changed completely.
It felt like the landscape was making the same transition we were.
Budva was fading behind us. Buenos Aires was starting to come into view ahead.
Podgorica was just a short stop before heading back. I didn't find in it the same beauty I'd found in other places on the trip.
It's a city that was almost completely destroyed in World War II, and much of what stands today was rebuilt afterward. That also gives it a strange feeling: it looks like an old city that actually had to start over.
And we were doing something similar.
Before leaving, we took the Tesla to get it washed so it would be spotless before storing it. Back in Argentina I was used to more improvised car washes, and I had no real idea how you wash a Tesla. Gonzalo, on the other hand, showed up with an arsenal of specific products, almost one for every part of the car. It made me laugh, but honestly, it came out spotless.
After that we found a place near the airport run by a family who looked after cars. There weren't many options, and we decided to trust them. And they proved we'd chosen well: they sent us photos every so often and even put a cover on it to protect it. Their care and hospitality went beyond what we expected, and that's where the Tesla stayed for about two and a half months, until we came back.
The Tesla stayed parked. The suitcases got packed again.
And we got on a plane to Buenos Aires.
We were going home, but only for a while. A move was waiting for us, a house to take apart, and a life we'd already decided to set back in motion.
