My love for traveling and adventure has always been strong. As someone whose family didn’t travel much, I looked forward to each trip we were able to take. Every few years, we would load up in my grandmother’s car around 3 am and head north to Wisconsin, about 8 hours from our home in Ohio, to visit my great aunt. I recall stopping at the Great Lakes on our way and visiting small towns in Michigan and Wisconsin to hear about my family’s past. Of course, I loved visiting with my family that I rarely got to see, but as I sat in the back of my grandmother’s car with my iPod cranked up in my ear, I watched the world go by, and I craved to see more of it.
As I got older, the ability for me to travel continued to expand. At my community church, mission trips were a high school only faction, which meant I was able to go on four of them during my school years. The planning for each one took roughly half a year, and these 6 months or so were spent volunteering and working hard to earn the money to attend work mission. Mission was always about serving the community we visited, it was an added bonus that it typically was somewhere I had never been. I can vividly remember what it felt like counting down the days until we would set off to a new destination-hours from NW Ohio and to explore and immerse ourselves in the community which we would spend a week assisting and bonding with. Over the course of my four years, we traveled to the towns of Perryville, Arkansas; Black Mountain, North Carolina; Grafton, West Virginia; and Rosebud, South Dakota to spend a week per summer learning, serving and worshiping with the community.
