Best of '09 Blog Challenge: Trip

(catch up post)

Best of 2009 Blog Challenge, Day 1: Trip!
There is no doubt in my mind what the best trip of 2009 was, because it is possibly the best trip I've ever done in my entire 22 year old life.

The Utah trip. 11 Italian exchange students, 3 americans, 1 French Exchange student, and 1 Japanese Exchange Student. All of us road tripped Memorial Day Weekend to Utah (a friend has a farm there), and we visited the 4 Corners, Zion National Park, Lake Powell, Monument Valley, Arches National Park, and Antelope Canyon.

First of all, the landscape was absolutely breathtaking. And I actually mean that, at times none of us could catch our breath because we couldn't believe things like this actually existed.

Monument Valley

Lake Powell. Click for credit.

Zion National Park

Zion and Monument Valley pictures have not been doctored in any sort of way, they are straight from the camera. I can't say for the Lake Powell one because my photos are on a separate computer and that was taken from a website, but I can assure you that even if it is doctored, Lake Powell really does look like that. Vibrancy and all.

In the Zion photo, please note the people in the bottom left hand so you can get the scale of what we were hiking in and being around. At the top you can see the faint beginnings of one of the waterfalls there -- since it was a dry day, the waterfall wasn't that big but we were walking behind it.

Bigger than the grandiose setting we were in, this trip was the absolute best thing for me to go on in that time of my life. Perfect timing. It was the last few months of my college career with my closest friends at the time to places I had never been. It is one of the few times in my life where I was honestly, truly "in the moment" and completely carefree. Even though that trip resulted in several missed classes; my first missed journalism deadline ever; fights, bruises, and cuts; and a renewed wanderlust, my life is different because of it. The things I saw, choices I made, feelings I felt have impacted me forever.

And even though my relationship has changed with most of the people on that trip, every single one of them means something to me and plays a major part in who I am today. I'm never going to forget the exhilaration and meaning from this trip.

(+1 more boy, he wasn't present at Zion with us.)
We were on a ledge, hanging over one of the many valleys in Zion. You can't see the sign that we're behind that reads "Danger Beyond This Point."