Spotlight on Summer Travel: Signature Swashbucklers
by: Lynn Beavin
From Dollar General to Delphi and Germany, Signature students were to be found around the globe this summer. Read about six featured adventurers:
1. Kirsten Robards and friend, Carly Wagner, drove to Bloomington on their "first road trip without parents" the weekend before school started. The girls stayed with Wagner's sister for the weekend and went "shopping and shopping and shopping." Robards includes, "We stopped at Dollar General to get food and bought a gallon of sweet tea and cups, and we just drank out of this big bottle..." Sweet way to end the summer.
2. Brad Davis cruised to Key West and the Bahamas. Davis describes the experience as being "awesome," but adds that he and his family saw a few homeless people soliciting money.
"We gave in [to them] a few times," he says. Davis concludes, "[The trip] expanded my worldview while I got a tan."
3. Alex Levine was "all over Alaska and Canada" this summer. Levine, who has lived in and is used to the weather in Florida and Evansville, describes the Alaskan summer weather as being "pretty nice, but on the ship it was freezing! One night you couldn't get the door open to go out on deck for all the wind."
"We went on excursions!" she exclaims about the activities she participated in. While visiting the 49th state, Levine went hiking, went whale-watching, and saw her first glacier. She also got to experience "other cultures and bingo with old people." This June,
4. Callie Schmidt wants "to do foreign service, work with the UN but not as an ambassador-behind the scenes" when she gets out of school. This summer she went to the National Student Leadership Conference at the American University in Washington D.C. Schmidt says she "wanted to learn more about how the UN works." She visited the French embassy while she was at the capital. You go, girl!
5. Lindsay Witte traveled to San Francisco, California for a week. She took a walking tour of the Haight-Ashbury district and was affected by "how peaceful and open-minded everyone was. It's a totally different lifestyle...so diverse." The Haight was the home of a multitude of young people exploring alternate lifestyles in the sixties. The Grateful Dead lived here, and the band members "welcomed anybody" into their home. On a given night there could be "up to seventy people in their house."
"If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair..."
6. Kolin Rubel went to Greece and Rome on a trip with Ms. Pareja this summer. The group drove to St. Louis to debark at midnight on the 9 1/2 -10 hour flight to Rome. They also had a layover in Germany where a janitor threw away Rubel's passport. However, he was allowed to continue on in his travels and "went to Pompeii, the oracle at Delphi, the place where Caesar was supposedly burned, Vatican, the Sistine chapel," and the American embassy in Greece where he acquired a new passport for $300 dollars.
For more stories, talk to everyone around you. Students and staff all around school have amazing experiences to share!