April 29, 2022

Only my closest friends know that I’m not the most organized traveler. It’s a secret I’ve managed to hide pretty well. But when I tried to check into a hotel in Cape Town, South Africa, recently, the truth came out.

I unsnapped my passport holder and a tsunami of airline ticket stubs, grocery store receipts, and COVID-19 test results spilled onto the counter. The scraps of paper betrayed the length of my trip, from a Qatar Airlines boarding pass to an expired PCR test result from Lisbon.