Six days after graduation, four of my best friends and I flew to London and backpacked across Europe for 6 weeks. I was barely shy of 18, I had traveled to England a few times at that point to visit family, but really this trip was my first time traveling without my parents and it was liberating. For the first time, I really was able to make decisions on my own and be an adult. I made those decisions with my best friends, but it was so much more fun, because we were discovering the world together.

Our adventure was motivated by visiting our foreign exchange student friend who was from Vienna we met while studying at a UCSB for the summer. At 16 I met this awesome,  H & M clad European and fell in love with her European carefree attitude. So after spending a summer gettting to know this cool girl, I had the opportunity to get my license or save up money to go backpacking and visit my new friend. I chose the latter.

We went to London, Paris, Cap Ferret, Venice, Florence, Rome, Vienna, Salzburg and Amsterdam. It was a whirlwind, but one that I was happy to get swept up into. Since that summer, I have traveled EVERY summer since and have been to a lot of other wonderful destinations in Europe, South & Central America and South East Asia. But this was the trip that allowed me to fall in love with traveling! At that point, it was the best summer of my life.

And by the way, I didn’t end up getting my license till I was 22, but I visited Europe 4 more times since that first trip before having to pay for a car and insurance. I think that is money well spent! So kids the lesson of this story, is travel the world and prioritize how you spend your money to allow you to do what is really important.

This summer I am going to China with 10 students and infecting them with the travel bug!