Who Is Traveling Abroad?

     As driving into Hickory, Indiana, a tiny town, I see that every house has a basketball hoop on the side of their barn. The little town consists of one main street. It has the local supermarket, barbershop, hardware store and some other small stores. While driving on the main street, I noticed that everyone notices a stranger coming into town. That is how small Hickory is. Driving into the high school parking lot I see that the girls dominate the young men by far. Looking around I also see that everyone is talking about the basketball game that night.

The summer of 2016, my family decided to shake up our annual summer vacation by heading out west, and chose to go to Sedona, Arizona. Let me tell you, this place radiates beauty. If you've never heard of Sedona, I’ll give you some background real quick. The city IS a desert city. Everywhere you look there's just dirt or sand on the ground and lots of cacti. But the trait that distinguishes the city IS that it sits within a valley in the red rock. All around you stand mountains made of this fiery earth. During our stay there we hiked along many trails through the red rock to almost every tourist spot, some of which gave you a panoramic view of the mountains. The views appeared surreal and took my breath away. Yes, I could go on and on about the beauty of this city, but that's not quite what this story IS about. On this trip, my family and I got up close and personal with some areas of Sedona that one wouldn't call “tourist hotspots.” The town of Jerome is an old mining town built at the base of a mountain, that now has lots of shops and restaurants, and we decided to make this our next destination. So my dad plugged the town into his iPhone GPS (first mistake) and we headed out to reach our destination. Blue sky and deserted land rolled by as I stared out the window. Time seemed to slowly trail by and we did not see signs of the town anywhere. Then suddenly, the smooth asphalt turned to gravel, and immediately something seemed off. “Are you sure we’re going the right way??”

In one's life, for many, the place means everything. In the novel Blank by Trina St Jean, a young teen looses her memory after an upsetting accident and spends the novel trying to figure out what happened. Jessica's life is set in her family farm and surrounding forest. Setting is crucial to her story because of her love for nature, her accident, and her runaway plan. To begin, Jessica’s family farm is the perfect place for a nature lover like Jessica, it could be that living on the farm made her develop her love, or that is grew over time. Nonetheless, the farm is a crucial setting to the story: “After taking the first photo it starts to come back to me. Not a memory, but a feeling. Like I’ve done this before” (St. Jean 189). Here it is seen

It was nightfall before we reached the deceptively quiet town of Beacon Hills. The highway was shrouded thick with trees on each side and I was briefly reminded of home, an unsettling feeling forming in the pit of my stomach. ‘It’s safe here,’ Chris had assured us, ‘things will be easier.’ I wanted desperately to put faith in those words, repeating it to myself as a sort of mantra on the drive down, but the doubt had only grown with every mile we traveled.

As we were one hour into our journey, I began seeing the huge Appalachian mountains. The mountains looked surreal. The closer that we got to Lake Placid the larger the mountains were. We passed a waterfall that was crashing down against the clear blue lake. The lake was a puddle that casted a reflection of the bright sun. It took a long drive to get there, but once we got there it was sunny and bright. We brought up our loads of clothing and then went down to the beach on Mirror lake. There was boundaries on the beach of where you could go. The boundaries were marked with a rope and buoys. We had not known about those boundaries, so we crossed them. Each time we crossed them we would get yelled and whistled at. We saw a rock that was underwater. We really wanted to go explore it, so we ended up being complete rebels. We would hold our breath underwater and go explore the rock, and once we ran out of breathe would swim as quickly as we could up to the rope and pull ourselves inbounds. It was fun swimming, but we got tired very quickly. We headed back to the hotel, and took a

The town was fairly small for a while, but exploded in population when someone apparently found a 10 pound gold nugget in the mountainside. The town went from 40 to 500 people. Large mining companies paid people for their land, causing them to forget why they originally lived here for. Not only did these companies come and tirelessly excavate the mountains for gold, but they excavated The Northern Town’s reason of existence. The forty of us that originally lived in this Northern Town were here because we liked the town and wanted to life a calm life. After the nugget was found, others came for money and power instead.

We arrived at our destination… so I took my headphones out, and I put my iPhone away. I stepped off of the bus to see a large brick school building with some bricks missing and multiple cracked windows illuminated by light bulbs glowing brightly in classrooms full of innocent children. I began walking to the entrance of the school, trying to avoid the large cracks in the sidewalk that were filled with ice on this bitter December day. Snow was falling and the bitter cold and my new surroundings were shaking me to the core.

With a close-knit population never teetering over 400, a resident could barely sneeze without the entire village knowing within a matter of hours. This intimate knowledge of ones neighbors for the most part reassured the people of their safety - it was a seemingly picturesque place, carved upright and deeply rooted in moral principle. But like most villages accustomed to their solitude, an underlying distrust was present in the face of any outsider.

Our story starts in a small town called Wormwood. This town was exceptionally similar to other small towns all around the world in some aspects and drastically different in others. It was a town where everyone knew each other by name, a place you couldn’t exactly blend into the woodwork and keep your head down. Word traveled fast here; there were no secrets that stayed secret for long. It was a dark and dingy place, brimming with claustrophobic alleyways and menacing shadows. The people were no different. They reflected the town they called home, all crooked and devious. When you were born in Wormwood, it was unlikely you would call any other place home. This town sucked you in and sucked you dry; once you were there, you were there to stay.

In 79 AD Pompeii, a city of architectural triumphs, was destroyed by Mount Vesuvius. The volcano’s eruption ended Pompeiian civilization and for a long time it was thought to have destroyed the city. However in 1748 the city’s ruins were rediscovered and Italy made quick work of excavating the site. The city retained much of it’s former beauty even after it’s destruction making it an immediate tourist trap. Despite the hours of work my parents put into planning our Italian adventure, my brother and I had our own plans. My parents expected this and planned for it but my brother and I are overachievers of a sort. We fought constantly throughout the first week, but it was in no way comparable to our day-trip to Pompeii.

A shady bus tour of young men and women are headed to an elusive village called Nanakimura. A destination where people can partake in a utopian existence, free of the world's obstacles... or so goes the rumor. Heading deep into the mountains, the bus is carrying 30 different individuals, each harboring their own expectations and troubled hearts... What they had arrived to was an uninhabited village with lingering, faint scents of life and it was falling apart. Just what

Just 252 miles from Paris lies a small town called Dinan. In a 132 foot high tower, it feels like being on top of the world, as if everything is visible. In Paris, France on the lake Lac Daumesnil, many tourists are on boats staring in wonderment at the colorful fish and the swans who are gracefully swimming without disturbing each other. While visiting the Catacombs of Paris it was chilling to see that many skeletons. There was that slight moment of fear while walking past the door that leads to Hell just knowing if you took one too many steps towards it then there would no longer be light, friends, or family to see; only darkness... Then suddenly, pulled back into reality the tour is over and there’s sunlight everywhere. While walking about

I pulled up to the only traffic light in town in a hand-me-down Buick from my grandparents, listening to some old tape that was left behind in the glove compartment. The hum of the song filled the car and poured out the windows to the desolate streets around me. It seemed as if I was able to listen to the entire song before the light changed and not a single car had crossed my path. It didn't always seem this small, There was a point in time where the town's winding dirt roads lead only to adventure and I was satisfied with the distance at which my bike could take me. I remember one time when I was about twelve years old, I set off at about noon with my neighbor which I had known from birth with the idea of mapping out our whole town. My mother called out “Be home before dusk” as we grabbed our bikes and set off on that days mission. Within two hours, we had outlined the entire border of our town and recorded all the important landmarks from the hardware store on main street where we could buy little candies for only a penny, to the house we thought to be haunted on Church Street. That's how small my town was.

Are you planning a trip to Europe? Are you interested in history and ancient architecture? If you are going to Europe, don’t forget to visit Turkey. And once you get to Turkey, don’t get stuck in Istanbul, because you need to make sure you go and visit Ephesus. Ephesus is a city that’s rich in Greek and Roman history, with many prominent attractions and ruins that you won’t want to miss.

Now it is the time for you to meet five of us. First is Tran Phuong Nga, who is usually called ‘eating girl’ because all of her