For our trip to Italy, we booked everything with our smartphones—just tapping away. Cheap flights, hotels, tickets to St. Peter’s Basilica, even the high-speed train from Rome to Salerno. Honestly, I felt like all you need for international travel these days is your passport, a credit card, and your phone… And I think that’s what led to me getting a little overconfident.

I was thinking, “No problem, we’ll just connect to the internet with an eSIM as soon as we arrive. And if English doesn’t work, I can just use Google Translate to communicate in Italian. It’s all figured out! Piece of cake! I’m unstoppable!”

On the other hand, my husband is still very analog… He was like, “I don’t trust that stuff. We should have everything on paper, just in case.” He insisted we print everything out, so I did—just to make him feel better.

We arrived in Rome around 8 p.m. Okay, time to connect the eSIM and use Google Maps to get to our hotel… but no matter how many times I tried, it just wouldn’t work. I started to panic. I had heard the area around Termini Station wasn’t very safe, so the idea of getting lost there at night was really scary.

And then—my husband calmly pulled out a paper guidebook from his backpack and said, “I memorized the map just in case.” And I’m not even kidding—he started walking confidently like he’d been there before, barely even looking at the map.

And somehow… we made it safely to the hotel.

We were starving by then, so we went to a restaurant near the hotel that he had already researched. That was our first meal in Rome—pizza Margherita. The inside of the restaurant kind of looked like Saizeriya, but wow, everything tasted amazing!

Seeing my husband lead the way like that made him seem more confident and reliable than usual… and it kind of brought back the feelings from our honeymoon.