Caught in a downpour in Brussels, Erika Tymrak opened the door of a pub far from the well-worn tourist path and entered a hidden gem full of ale casks and history. She and her boyfriend found not only shelter and beverages but new friends and traveling companions.
In search of food and football in Madrid, Tymrak picked a nondescript eatery on only the less-than-stringent qualification that it offered both something to eat and a television to watch the game. She stumbled into one of the best meals of her life and returned night after night to dine amongst the locals.
Practicing thriftiness in Poland by taking a local train instead of a non-step express, she spotted a picturesque small town at one stop and disembarked on nothing more than a whim. The afternoon offered a glimpse of Poland every bit as memorable as found in its major cities.
Sometimes life is best when plans don't get in the way of experiences.
"I think it's finding a balance," Tymrak said of the philosophy that guides her globetrotting. "Doing research and knowing what you want to see, but also having the ability to just fly by the seat of your pants while you're there is so important."
There is something to be said for playing soccer that way, too. For one of the most entertaining players in the women's game, the joy is the journey.
To the frequent delight and only occasional chagrin of fans, coaches and teammates, the FC Kansas City midfielder plays the game the same way she travels the world and the same way she lives. The moves are improvisational, inventive and improbable. No back heel, no step over, no Cruyff turn need be left untried. No space is too small to squeeze a shot or a pass -- or an entire 5-foot-5 frame, for that matter -- through. Few are skilled enough to do what she does. Fewer still would think to try.
"Erika really does enjoy the beauty and the art of the game," said Becky Burleigh, Tymrak's coach at the University of Florida. "She's worked really hard at the other stuff, like defending and organizing and communicating and all of that. But when you see her at her best, it's when she's got the ball at her feet and she's just making things happen."
That Kansas City enters its National Women's Soccer League semifinal against the Chicago Red Stars as the only franchise to qualify for the postseason in each of the league's first three seasons is not a coincidence. Even surrounded by players like Nicole Barnhart, Lauren Holiday, Heather O'Reilly, Amy Rodriguez and Becky Sauerbrunn, veterans who are the collective embodiment of understated world-class excellence done by the book, Tymrak does not hesitate to deviate from a plan. She is the calligraphy amidst print.
Nor is the team afraid to let her, most specifically and commendably head coach Vlatko Andonovski.
A second-round pick in 2013, Tymrak went on to be the league's rookie of the year and then tied for third on the team in goals and second in assists en route to a championship a season ago. She remained a constant through this season's World Cup comings and goings. Despite sitting out the final game of the regular season with an ankle injury, which she said will not limit her in the semifinal, Tymrak played more minutes for FC Kansas City this season than any non-defender save ironwoman Jen Buczkowski.
"Erika is one of those players who performs very much better if she is given freedom," Andonovski said. "One thing that in the three years we've been trying to do is put Erika on a position or a certain part of the field where she is going to be able to expose that creativity while she is doing it in a structured environment. I think that she took that role very well. And in the three years that she's been with us, that she grew as a player and now we have a little more mature player on the field who is ready to move to the next level."
The results are fodder for highlights and tributes from an already sizable contingent of fans, a base that will only grow if, as Andonovski alluded, she is ready for a return to the national team, for which she played three games in 2013 and 2014 under former coach Tom Sermanni. Her style is easy to celebrate from the distance of YouTube. Perhaps more revelatory is the support of those won over, someone like the defensive midfielders who play behind her and whose job it is to clean up and cover when she begins to improvise.
A member of the same recruiting class at Florida, and someone who went on to play for the NWSL's Washington Spirit, Holly King filled that role for quite some time.
It was not instant adulation from a no-nonsense, task-oriented, hard-tackling teammate.
Asked if she recalled a moment some years ago when Burleigh wanted to know what she thought of Tymrak's style, King said, "It was probably along the lines of, 'Becky, I'm sick of doing all the dirty work; Erika never has to defend.'"
Close but not quite.
As Burleigh recalled it, the sentiment King expressed was that when the tricks worked, they were great. But when they didn't, Tymrak needed to cut that stuff out.
In the heat of the moment, which is quite some heat on a typical day in Gainesville, "stuff" might not have been the word of choice to make the point.
"It just took awhile for me to realize that's she's one of those players that half the time it works and half the time it might not," said King, now the girls varsity soccer coach at Heritage High School in Leesburg, Virginia. "But when it does work, it's like magic. There's no other way to put it; she's the craftiest player I've ever played with.
"She just made people look stupid."
Raised in Michigan before a move to Florida as a teenager, that style is both how Tymrak learned the sport and why she fell in love with it. She didn't have her own cell phone until about the time she left for college. She didn't have a laptop, didn't spend hours watching television. Time instead passed outside with a soccer ball. She loved the challenge of the tricks and the ball skills, all the more because they leveled the playing field for someone who was always smaller than her peers (although as the NWSL's most frequently fouled player this season, and its third-most fouled a season ago, it's debatable how much punishment the trickery actually alleviated). Figure skating, another of her activities, incorporates artistic expression into performance, but she preferred the unscripted opportunities of a soccer field.
"On the field, I don't really like structure, I don't like guidelines," Tymrak said. "I like the fluidity of the game. I play on the left, but if I end up on the right side of the field that's totally fine with me, as long as someone covers for you in your position. I don't like structure that much. I like the creativity of it. I think I'm a creative person off the field, very free-spirited and carefree. I'd say I'm similar on and off the field, and my style of play kind of carries over to how I like to live my life."
Which is to say she explores it.
The travels she chronicles, along with matters culinary, fitness and fashion, on an entertaining blog titled The Hangry Vagabond began unceremoniously. Part of the national team that represented the United States in the inaugural Under-17 World Cup in New Zealand, her bag attracted the attention of a sniffer dog in customs upon arrival in that country for a warmup tournament. The unintentionally smuggled contraband turned out to be a banana, that offense worsened by dirt discovered on the cleats in her bag, both finable violations of the nation's strict quarantine regulations. There are, it turns out, rules by which even she must abide. But momentary adolescent embarrassment proved little deterrent. That first trip, followed by games in places like Costa Rica, Sweden and Trinidad & Tobago, fed a hunger for more.
"Some of the girls would spend the days Skyping back home or relaxing back at the hotel," Tymrak said. "It's obviously tough because you're kind of worn out from practicing and games, but I don't know, I don't feel like that's going to hold me back at all. I'm in this country, I'm going to use every second I can to explore."
Somewhere in there is the difference between traveling and trying to get to a destination, the same difference that, expressed on a soccer field, separates Tymrak, Megan Rapinoe, Tobin Heath and a handful of others from most players. Andonovski, for example, will sometimes give Tymrak a hard time, good naturedly, when she struggles with passing patterns in practice, those most basic of drills in which balls follow prescribed paths among a group of players. She can be reminded any number of times that the ball needs to go from A to C, but even if her mind didn't wander elsewhere during the instructions, it sometimes just feels more natural to pass the ball to F instead.
Winning is the ultimate objective, sure, but perhaps not at the expense of suppressing the creativity and freedom a field offers. She has worked camps and clinics and been left dumbfounded at how even older players in their teens struggle with simple ball skills, perhaps one more reflection of a culture of youth soccer that places too great an emphasis on winning instead of developing skills. If her style adds a dimension that "allows people to see women's soccer in a different light," as she put it, then all the better.
"I think there have been moments where coaches tried to, not change my style of play but tell me to play more of a certain way," Tymrak said. "I think they've realized that I'm playing my best when I'm able to be creative and able to have like a blank canvas in front of me and do what I want -- not in a snotty way at all, but more of that's how my brain works."
Another backpacking trip awaits when the playoffs conclude, the territory this time shrunk from all of Europe to the United Kingdom and her boyfriend again her travel partner. There will be a slightly more organized itinerary this time, a few more lodgings booked and plans made in advance, including a game between Premier League sides Chelsea and Aston Villa. But odds are that somewhere along the line, the plan will fall away, an entire country far too big a canvas to let go to waste.
Set to accompany her friend on a previous trip until real life intervened in the form of a teaching job, King offered perhaps the best description of the traveler and the player.
"She's just so independent and is a vagabond," King said. "It would definitely be an adventure, that's for sure."