Travel

I flew into Florence on a Wednesday afternoon in mid-June. Wrestling with jet lag, I went to bed early the first night after a delicious dinner at an osteria a few blocks north of the Arno River with my family. The next day, we strolled through the city and visited Santa Maria del Fiore, known as Il Duomo. We visited the baptistery outside the cathedral, and then walked into the church itself. Beneath the church we toured an ancient Roman town that had been on the site before the cathedral. Then we climbed the dome, which offered spectacular views of Florence’s rooftops.

My flight landed in Cancun, Mexico a little before nine PM. A shuttle took my family to our hotel in Playa del Carmen, a beach town about 40 minutes south of Cancun. Perhaps slightly less blatantly commercial than Cancun or Cozumel, Playa del Carmen is still highly Americanized, and its main drag, “La Quinta Avenida”, has certainly inherited some of the materialism of its namesake. For the most part, though, we enjoyed our beach resort, the Shangri-La Caribe, and the ocean waters consistently warmer than seventy degrees.

Landlocked in central Europe, Switzerland is an eclectic mix of cultures. In the north, it is predominantly German-speaking, in the west, French. Parts of southeastern Switzerland are indistinguishable from Italy—they speak Italian, eat Italian food, and everything from the architecture to the landscape seems Italian. On my tour of Switzerland in the summer of 2006, I managed to see all three areas. Each had its uniquely unforgettable moments.

We flew into Bern. Though it’s Switzerland’s capital, Bern is a small city in the German-speaking region. The airport can’t handle jets, and the surrounding area is predominantly agricultural. We spent our first day exploring Bern and trying to combat jet lag.

The town of Skagway is nestled on the shore of the Pacific Ocean in southwestern Alaska. It is situated at the northern end of Alaska’s Inside Passage, a busy shipping lane dotted with tiny, often uninhabited isles and rimmed by countless blue-white glaciers. In 1897, gold was discovered in the Klondike region, and soon thousands of prospectors flocked to Skagway. It became a bustling mining town, complete with its own railway, port, and brand of Old West lawlessness. But within two years the gold rush subsided, and Skagway’s economy collapsed.

The summer after my freshman year of high school, I spent three weeks at the Cambridge College Program, an opportunity for high school students around the globe to live at Cambridge University and take classes from Cambridge professors. I took two courses, one in astrophysics and one in debate. The courses were fascinating, and both of my professors were extremely knowledgeable, gifted teachers. But in addition to taking these classes, I was looking forward to the opportunity to explore Europe, a continent I had never seen before.

During junior high school I was lucky enough to find a program through my school that took a group of students on an ecotour of Costa Rica for twelve days during the summer. I begged my parents to let me go the summer after my sixth grade year. They refused, but agreed to let me go the next year if I raised half of the money myself. During seventh grade, I worked to raise the money and eagerly anticipated my departure to Central America. Early in the summer, I closed out my bank account and paid my parents my share of the costs. I was actually going to go!