10 Travel Moments That Teach Us Kindness Finds You in Unfamiliar Places

People
09/08/2026
10 Travel Moments That Teach Us Kindness Finds You in Unfamiliar Places

Nobody is at their best in transit. You are tired, you are somewhere unfamiliar, and whatever composure you normally travel with has usually gone by the second airport. That is the state most of us are in when a stranger decides what kind of person they are going to be toward us.

Travel makes you legible in a way ordinary life does not. Everyone can see your suitcase, your queue, your hotel confirmation, your worst hour. Solo travel makes it sharper still, because there is nobody beside you to absorb it. And every so often the kindness arrives from the exact direction you had written off.

1.

I flew business for the first time in my life, on points I’d been saving for four years, and my son screamed for six of the nine hours to Toronto. Nothing worked. Not the tablet, not the snacks, not the toy I’d hidden in my bag specifically for the bad hour. He’d been up since three that morning and he was too tired to be soothed by anything. I was crying by hour six, quietly, with my hand over my face. That’s when a man behind me shouted, “You’ve not earned the right to be a mother!” Somebody laughed.

Then the attendant knelt beside my seat and said, “Ma’am, don’t move. Row 2 has asked me to bring him to her for twenty minutes so you can sleep.” The woman in 2A was about seventy and had five grandchildren, and she walked my son up and down the galley until he went out cold on her shoulder. She brought him back and sat on the arm of my seat and said, “I had four under six and a husband who travelled. Somebody did this for me on a train in 1979 and I have been waiting a very long time to pass it on.” She never once looked at the man behind me.

2.

This will forever be one of my most heartwarming memories and bring back faith in humanity. Traveling Cambodia on a rented motorcycle when torrential flood rains hit, I finally came upon a roadside convenience stop with dirt floors, a few posts with tin roofs, and local fruit and gasoline jugs. Immediately upon running under cover, the woman behind the counter rushed around to find a five-gallon bucket for me to take a seat while waiting out the rain. She then disappeared in the back and came out with a rag. I had chosen to put on mascara that day, and in the rain it must have been covering my face in black smears. She tenderly took my face in her hands and cleaned the mascara off. Neither of us could speak a single word in each other’s native language, but it was a moment of connected womanhood and caring for each other that keeps my heart warm years later.

3.

My son and I were traveling in Mexico. He was 6 at the time. We were in Cuernavaca, staying with a lively 80-year-old woman.

My son woke up sick in the middle of the night. He was crying. Josefina heard him whimpering and got up, ran down to her garden, and picked some leaves and boiled my son a tea with them.

She then laid next to him on his mat on the floor, petted his head over and over, pressing a damp towel on his face, saying “mi pobrecito, mi pobrecito, oooohhh mi bebé” while spoon-feeding him the tea she made.

This beautiful 80-year-old woman laid on a thin mattress, cradling and rocking him until he settled and fell asleep.

4.

In Osaka, Japan, I was struggling up the stairs from a train station with a suitcase because there was no elevator at that station. At least three Japanese people offered to help me carry it. I turned them down because I’m so used to Tokyo and nobody helping. Finally, one girl just looked at me, didn’t ask, and picked up the other end of the heavy suitcase, and we both carried it up the stairs. It was so unexpected. I’m so used to people just minding their own business.

5.

When I was 20, traveling on a train through France, I was feeling a bit lonely, and an older French woman said something to me (I wish I could remember what). I replied in broken French and told her I was just learning. She moved seats to sit by me and told me her husband was an English teacher. We spent the whole ride practicing my French; she would ask me questions and let me respond, and even wrote out some grammar tricks to help me remember. I still think about her now and again; I hope she’s doing well. I was going through a rough time, and this random conversation with a stranger on a train reminded me of the kindness in the world :’)

6.

I went to England in 2010, travelling solo for the first time on another continent, very young and very unprepared.

I overslept my bus stop going from London to Cambridge, and when I woke up, I realized I had no idea where I was or what to do to get back to Cambridge. This was before I had a smartphone, so I couldn’t pull up GPS, and I hadn’t brought my regular flip phone because the roaming would have been outrageously expensive and spotty.

I was trying not to freak out and I told the bus driver my problem just praying he would just tell me how to get back to Cambridge (his name was Samir, I’ll never forget) and he 1) let me use his personal cell phone to call my friend that I was meeting in Cambridge and was clearly late to the bus stop where my friend was waiting on me and 2) he drove me all the way back to Cambridge! He could have been annoyed, or unhelpful, or anything else, but he is forever the man for that. I don’t believe in angels, but if I did, he’s definitely one. I felt so vulnerable and scared, and he completely took care of me without a second thought. Bus drivers rule!

7.

Took a train to a town in southern Mexico. The hotel wouldn’t let my friend and me in to crash with our friends, and we tried climbing up into the mountains and sleeping outside, but we ended up in a cow field by accident (woke up to bulls snorting twenty feet away!), and it was already getting dewy at 11, so we walked back to town and found a taco cart. We were joking with the taco stand owner about the night we’d had and he told his friend to watch the cart, took us to his house, and gave us a room to sleep in. We met his family and had breakfast with them the next morning. Thanks, magic taco stand man!

8.

Last year when I was in London, I got to Paddington. I had just missed the first train, so I decided to wait for the next one. I made sure that was a good plan by asking one of the station clerks. I got a coffee and waited about 10 minutes, but the train still wasn’t boarding.

I asked another station clerk, who then informed me that the next two or three trains to Heathrow were cancelled. I freaked out a little and wasn’t sure what to do. I had already bought my ticket and had no clue how to exchange it for the Heathrow Express. The clerk tried to use my card on his card reader device, but it kept declining.

At that point, I was almost crying and ready to just get an Uber. I thought that was it, and I was going to miss my flight home. The clerk then told me to follow him to the Express train that was leaving in a couple of minutes. He had me stand on the platform for a minute, then as the train was getting ready to leave, he told me to get on.

I sat towards the front as the train started to leave the station, and when the clerk came around to collect tickets, he just winked at me and kept walking by. I got to Heathrow with two hours to spare, and thanked the guy over and over for his kindness. He made it seem like it was no big deal, but since I never paid the Express price and clearly didn’t give myself enough time to catch the right train, he could’ve easily left me alone in Paddington to miss my flight, but he didn’t, and I’ll never forget his compassion for a silly solo traveler like me. :)

9.

In Japan in the late 90’s. So no cellphone. Took a train somewhere in another city and got lost. I knew some very basic Japanese and asked for help. Had written down where I was going, and this woman walked me all the way there, practicing her English on me along the way. It was a lovely interaction I’d want to experience again.

10.

My period came three days early on the flight to ORD and by the time I noticed, it had soaked through my trousers. It was the last leg of three weeks of solo travel and I had nobody with me to stand in front of anything. I asked a flight attendant for a pad as quietly as I could and she was lovely about it, but the woman across the aisle heard me and muttered, “This girl has no shame.” Loud enough. I changed in the lavatory, folded my cardigan on my lap for the rest of the flight, and did not look at anyone for four hours.

Then as I stood up to get off, she suddenly yelled, “Stop that woman! She has forty people about to walk out behind her.” The whole row froze. She got up, took off her long coat and held it out to me, and said, “Put this on. Nobody out there needs to know your business.” I got off that plane in a stranger’s coat with her address written on a boarding pass, and when I posted it back to Illinois I put a note in the pocket. She wrote to me twice after that. She told me she’d said something unkind at the start of the flight and spent the next four hours deciding she wasn’t going to be a person who said things like that. I still have both letters. Compassion arrived four hours late from the last person on that plane I expected it from.

Has a person ever been the biggest souvenir you brought back from a trip?

None of this makes the itinerary. You don’t come home and tell people about the twenty minutes a stranger held your child, or the coat somebody put around your shoulders in a jet bridge. You tell them about the hotel and the weather. What you keep is the compassion, and you almost never keep the name attached to it.

But that is what stays. Years later the travel blurs into one long corridor and what survives is the person who chose, in a bad hour, to be decent to you. The kindness is the part you keep, and the happiness of it usually arrives from someone whose name you never got.

Read next: 10 Acts of Kindness That Teach Us Tender Compassion Still Lives in American Neighborhoods

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