Tell Me A Story @ TBEX10

At this year's TBEX, I'm co-hosting the community keynote with Mike Barish.

1. At a guest house in the Austrian Alps, I met an old farmer who sat out WWII because he was captured by American soldiers his first day in uniform. He spent the entire war in a POW camp in Texas and loved it so much he didn't want to go home.

2. My sister in law did not believe the things I wrote on my blog about crossing the street in Hanoi. After we returned the US, she called my husband and I overheard him retelling how we stepped off the curb into moving traffic and the scooters and cars went around us like a river around stones. I still think about crossing the street in Vietnam's cities as the ultimate act of faith.

3. When I returned from India, I could not go to the supermarket without bursting into tears. A trip to Costco sent me into a depression that was diagnosed as suicide risk though what I really suffered from was culture shock so severe as to prevent me from buying shampoo or cereal for months.

I met Elvis in Alaska, woke up to a pink sky and a symphony of birds at a watering hole in the Australian bush, and from a balcony in Northern Israel watched the sky light up with what I thought was fireworks but was really the opening salvos in the Israel/Lebanon war. So many stories fill my unwritten autobiography, so many places and people, sometimes I pull them out of a dusty mental shoebox into the light and think, yeah, that really happened. THAT REALLY HAPPENED.

And while it is a privilege to have those things in my past, I realize that I am not so special, that there are loads of other travelers out there with loads of stories that are equally unbelievable, others who remember walking across the Himalayas in cheap sneakers or asking for help in the back streets of Alexandria and receiving, in perfect English, the words, "I can not help you, you are lost."

These are my stories and if you ask me about, say, Vietnam or my last trip to Oahu, or so many other places, I won't shut up. But I'm not trying to tell my stories, I'm looking for yours. The absurd and frightening and funny and unbelievable -- that moment when the ground went out from under you or you were in the waking dream or you met someone who changed what you thought about history. I want to see what's in your shoebox of memories that, when you take it out and look at it, makes you think, "Yeah, that really happened. IT REALLY HAPPENED. "

The TBEX Community Keynote is your chance to share your story about the magical thing -- and I don't mean only good witch magic, I mean all kinds, voodoo curses, tiny blessings, unexpected saints, and monsters from the deep included -- that happened because of your travels. The story that REALLY happened, that sits in your storage locker but never loses its secret powers. We want the story that makes you ask yourself, "Wow, did that really happen? " And then, the answer, "I was there, I know. THAT REALLY HAPPENED."

All the details for submitting your story to the TBEX Community Keynote are here.