A year ago today, I found out that my footprints are pretty small compared to dinosaur footprints. I found this out by comparing the size of my foot to the size of a dinosaur footprint. A real dinosaur footprint!!! Turns out Bolivia is home to one of the largest collections of dinosaur footprints in the world, and so I took the local bus an hour our of the city to Cal Orco Cretaceious Park to decide for myself if dinosaurs actually deserve all the hype they get. Spoiler alert, they do.

I wore a funky helmet and followed my guide down the dusty excavation site, all the way up to a massive sediment wall. The tour guide drew our attention to a T-rex footprint, explaining that the wall had once been flat. The one footprint alone was pretty cool, so imagine how awesome it was to see another (this time of a Ceratops), and another (of a Sauropod) and then a several whole tracks of footprints that appeared to climb up this wall.  I caught the bus back about two hours later, knowing way more about dinosaurs than I expected South America to provide me with.

I reached the hostel at around 3:30 to find one of my roommates waking up after a long night of partying with several others from my hostel. He had asked if I wanted to join, but exploring is a tiring job, and so I declined. Several others had just woken up, and some were cooking while others read books and chatted over cigarettes.

I remember being so intrigued by this lifestyle; by watching people make and change plans instantly. While I had no inclination (nor the time) to be as truly nomadic as some of them were, I will say that they inspired me to let loose once in a while and go with the flow. I made the distinction between blank slates and flexible schedules, and decided I was happy enough with sticking to the latter for the time being.