Summer 2013 I’d been studying Spanish since 6th grade, and my dear friend Marta, from Madrid, had been a foreign-exchange student at my high school. To celebrate my high school graduation and 18th birthday, I set out to visit my “soul sister” in Spain for about 10 days. Marta and her dad picked me up from Madrid’s airport, and I stayed with them in the suburbs for the first half of the trip. We explored the city, visiting historic plazas, cathedrals, government buildings, and

Summer 2015 Summer between sophomore and junior year of college: probably  the best summer of my life. Around Christmas the year before, my best friend and fellow travel bug, Schyler, floated the idea of backpacking around Europe. And so the planning began. Our friend Sam joined in, and we built a few reunions into the trip—meeting up with Marta, our high school’s Spanish exchange student, in Barcelona, and my mom in Berlin before wrapping things up in Prague. We flew into At