Hey y'all! My name is Allison Koontz, I am 21 years old, and I live in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley (below is one of my favorite pictures from home). I have just finished my junior year in college and I have decided to start a blog about all of my traveling adventures. Before my first year of college, I had never left the United States. Then I decided to join a trip to Costa Rica over the spring break of my freshman year, and I have been obsessed ever since.
In the fall of 2017, I went on a study abroad to Dublin, Ireland. I was in Europe for 12 weeks, and while I was there I traveled quite a bit. I went to Scotland, London, Italy, France, Germany, and Austria. I will write more in depth about each of these places in my Throwback Thursday's.
Currently, my set list of places I am traveling includes Costa Rica (yes, again) from May 13 to June 10 and Maine for a week in July, and the next big one, Cuence, Ecuador in the spring of 2020 for 12 weeks. Costa Rica will include four days a week of classes but Friday, Saturday, and Sunday will be traveling days to all sorts of places.
For this blog, I plan to write something weekly about where I am when I am traveling and any notable activities I am doing, and for the weeks I am not traveling I will do a Throwback Thursday for different countries/cities I have been to.
Now that all of the boring stuff has been said, I want to take a minute to explain why I am doing this, other than because I have traveled a lot. I believe that traveling significantly impacts who a person is and how they think and behave. Experiencing another culture is a beautiful and life-changing thing that can not be replaced or learned by reading books or watching movies. These things can help by inspiring a person to travel or informing them of cool places to visit or what the highest rated vineyard in Italy is, but without actually going to these places and speaking to the people (as much as you can if there is a language barrier), you are not experiencing anything out of the ordinary.
You can look at videos of people surfing in Costa Rica or hear stories about insane airport complications, but until you go and actually do it, it will not mean anything to you. These experiences, good and bad, make such a difference in the way you act, think, and speak. It changes the way you treat people, it changes your views on humanity as a whole. Without seeing these things with your own eyes, nothing would impact you in a meaningful and lasting way.
Thanks for reading and I hope you tune in to more stories! Subscribe if you want to hear more and let me know if you have any questions/requests! Have an amazing day and make some travel plans to go somewhere and experience new things!
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