Why My Ex-Husband Is My Favourite Person to Travel With

I’m writing this from a camper van on the Isle of Skye, in Scotland, weathering the remains of Storm Isha, which blew through last night with 100 mph winds. A man I love just handed me a coffee, prepared exactly the way I like it, while gleefully sharing the activities he found for us that he knows I would enjoy.

His plan includes an alchemy-themed cocktail class called “Potions” at the Cauldron in Edinburgh, and exploring a creepy castle in the woods that was converted into a hospital before being abandoned. This man is my most compatible (and yes, fully platonic) travel buddy in the world—and he happens to be my ex-husband. We still adventure together about once a year.

Kelby and I met on Valentine’s Day years ago, when I was living in the Andes of Argentine Patagonia, just outside the town of El Bolsón, and he was backpacking through for a month. I showed him around my adopted country, we quickly fell in love, and met up later that year to explore wildflower fields in England (he’s a botanist) and to indulge in the ancient baths of Budapest (I’m a sucker for all things spa-like).

I’m used to travelling alone and often prefer it that way. As a travel writer, I have the flexibility to go where I want, when I want, and I love to explore slowly. His career gives him four months off work a year, and he’s open to embracing the unexpected anywhere. I quickly noticed that travelling with him did not interrupt my exploration style — it complemented it.

On trips with other friends, there was always a need for compromise. I sleep by 10 p.m. and wake naturally by 6 a.m., excited to start the day. They would doze until mid-afternoon and want to go out drunken dancing until dawn. I would end up being their (annoyed) personal photographer so they could post to Instagram no less than 10 times a day. They would scorn my delicious, local street food and prefer to pay 20 times more for the exact food we could easily get at home.

With my ex-husband, he’s always happy to accompany me on a sunrise hike. Street food is his favourite — the sketchier the ambience, the better. If we are out of signal range for days on end, he is content, not agitated.

He intuitively knows when to stop the car for me to take in the pretty light cascading through tree branches, and I know to slam on the brakes if I see a roadside landscape perfect for him to boulder. He is a king of CrossFit, and I am a much lazier queen of a great picnic—no one else will joyfully carry a massive backpack full of food, wine, blankets and books to a mountain summit for me, just so we can enjoy an epic lunch.

After our divorce, he moved to Australia, and I moved to the U.S. The first time we planned to travel together after the separation, our loved ones assumed we were getting back together or, at the very least, having a hard time adjusting to the distance between us. Sadly, it seems like much of society thinks you are supposed to automatically hate your ex.

But just because we didn’t function well as a married couple doesn’t mean that we don’t work spectacularly as best friends who genuinely delight in each other’s company. I’m proud that we’ve been able to hold onto everything that was rich and beautiful in our marriage, while fully letting go of what was not. Travelling as friends is our way of celebrating that.

After we finish our Scotland journey, with a finale on the Shetland Islands for the spectacular Up Helly Aa Viking fire festival, we have two weeks in Cinque Terre and Tuscany, before we say goodbye for another year. We already have plans to learn to free-dive together in Mexico, to cross the Sahara Desert in Morocco, and to hike through Western China.

I could never have imagined how our marriage could bring us to where we are now, but I’m excited to see where this evolution of our relationship can take us in the world.