Going to new places and experiencing new life is something that I have been doing ever since I can remember. I've taken plenty of family vacations and I've also gone places on my own. I have always been fairly independent, and I think that's partially a result of being the oldest of four children.
I attribute my love of travel to my dad. He always gets excited when we go on trips and he plans out things for us to do and places that he wants to see. I blame him for my love of photography too. Always taking pictures wherever we go. It's nice though, to have documentation of a trip so that you can look back on it years from now and sigh and say to yourself, "I remember that."
When I started high school it seems I started traveling more. That had to do with sports and so I'm not sure if you really would call it traveling. But nights that I spent in hotel rooms in different parts of the state count to me as travels. Lewiston and Boise for my track experiences, Twin Falls for a drama competition, and Boise also for DECA when I was a junior. It was all fun.
We've been taking family vacations and mini trips ever since before I can remember. Our longest one that I remember is when my dad was switching jobs and he had something like a two week gap between his last day of his old job and his first day of his new job. We hit the road like there was no tomorrow. I don't remember everywhere we went, but I believe it had something to do with Oregon and I also remember the Red Woods of California. This last summer we went to Southern Utah and saw the glory of the red cliffs. We visited something around 7 parks in 9 days? I don't remember exactly, but it was a lot of beautiful red rock.
Soon enough we all got tired of the red everywhere we looked and high tailed it up to Grand Teton Nat'l Park so that our eyes could feast on the lush greeness of the mountains. Grand Teton and Yellowstone I think are my favorites. I know that Jackson Hole, Wyoming is my favorite town. I would live there, but it's ridiculously expensive. :-) Another trip I feel fortunate to have taken is the trip to Mexico with the Jesbergers. They had been my neighbors for nine years. I call Jan my Mom and Emily is just like another little sister. Mexico was beautiful and invigorating. I want to go back someday.
The sunsets in Mexico are exquisit. You can sit on the beach watching the sunset and it takes exactly 1 minute for the sun to disappear beneath the horizon once it has touched the edge. It's an amazing phenonmenon that I was priveleged to have witnessed.
The third trip I'm going to talk about in this post is my Germany trip. Two weeks around southern Germany living out of a backpack and staying in youth hostels located in basically a different town every night. It was exhillarating and fast paced and also exhausting. But it has kindled a love for foreign travel deep inside my nomadic heart.
I took four years of German when I was in high school and I have instilled a love for the language in each of my siblings. When I first started taking German, I inspired my Oma to look up our family's history because her father is German. This trip was just something special in every sense of the word. I got to practice my use of the language, I got to see many sights, including a concentration camp from WWII, and I got to bring back many pictures so I could share the experience with my family.
The town of Ottobueren, nestled beneath a mountain, on our way back from the Breitachklamm. Very beautiful.
Random fact: Bambi was originally published in 1929 in German.
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