Traveling

In the past years I've never really given traveling any thought. I was happy here in Canada, I never really wanted to see anything outside of it. The thought of being able to travel to Europe or Asia or even South America had never really occurred to me as a possibility. Until I met this girl at the beginning of the year, who happens to be a little history geek like me. We had like this short term best friendship type thing where for about 3 months she shared everything with me, or at least almost everything. In that everything she had told me that she wanted to travel to Europe. More specifically Germany, France, England, Belgium, Netherlands, I think I'm missing a few but you get the idea. She wanted to go visit all of the historical sights, and that's what caught my attention. I shared with her that it might be neat to be able to go and do all of those things, but that I didn't wanna get my hopes about because it would always be nothing but a dream to me. I would never have the money to be able to afford to go to all of these places and that was that, it was a fate that I had already accepted. Well this girl doesn't take no for an answer. She went and found out that by the time we'll be in grade twelve, so in two years, our school just happens to be going on a trip to Europe. So she got all excited and spent most of the time trying to convince me to go with her because she didn't wanna go alone. I kept telling her that I didn't really wanna go. She kept asking why. I kept saying that it just wasn't something that I was particularly interested in and we just didn't have the money to send me to Europe for 10 days. Well she kept bugging me and bugging me. And the more that we learnt in history class and the more books I read the more I kinda wanted to go and see all of these things, the more I wanted to go to all of these places where history actually happened. I think the thing that really made my mind up was losing my history teacher for a week because he was going to Europe with the trip that had been organised this year. Before he left he showed us pictures of past trips and with every picture that I saw I grew a little more jealous than the last. I wanted to be there so bad. Having to sit in class and knowing that he and a few of my friends were in Rome at the moment, or in London or Paris just drove me nuts. I knew that my mind had been made; I wanted to go to Europe in 2014. I knew that I either needed to give my mom a hell of a lot of time to think it over, or spring it on her in a day or so. As much as the first option would sound like the most logical one, I couldn't, there just wasn't enough time. Spots were filling up fast on that trip and if I wanted mine I needed to say so and soon. Within literally a couple of hours I was signed up for the trip and I'm sure the next day my mom had wondered what she had gotten me into, but it was too late to turn back, I had already made my minimum payment of 99$. On top of all of this, I managed to convince my very best friend to come with me. So here comes the part where I get to be all excited and talk about where I'm gonna go and what I'm gonna see. We're flying over to Berlin and we're staying there for two days. We're seeing things like the Berlin wall, Brandenburg Gate and Reichstag. Then we're going to Amsterdam for two days where we get to see the National Liberation Museum and the Anne Frank House, this is a dream come true for me and I'm not exaggerating. Next we get to tour the Vimy and Ypres regions for another two days, which makes me very excited since I've always had a thing for the battle of Vimy in 1917. Then we're headed to the Normandy region for one day. There we'll be able to tour the d-day beaches, then we travel to Paris! In Paris we get to see l'arc de triomphe, Versailles, as well as the Eiffel Tower! Then we head home. It's going to be an amazing trip and I honestly can't wait to be able to spend it all with my best friend. I know that we're gonna have a blast and I'm so thankful for the opportunity because I know that this is probably the only one I'm gonna have till quite a while after university. I think it's safe to say that it's really gonna be a trip to remember.