A trip that changed me

Assignment No. 2: Travel

~How has travel changed you? Prompt: "After I went to___, I felt differently about___."

Ever since I was a teenager I’ve had a really big desire to go to Hawaii. Since living in Southern California, it seemed like everyone I talked to, even all the people my age with kids traveled to Hawaii at some point. I grew up half of my life in Europe, so although I've done more than your average trips throughout Europe, Hawaii aways seemed like an unreachable star. Last year for our family's new year’s resolution we decided we would just do it, no matter what.

We went to Kauai based on the advice of my mom's cousin. Even though I had always imagined going to Maui, I'm so grateful we chose Kauai because otherwise I would have missed some of the most beautiful sights of my entire life. One of the things that surprised me the most were the lush colors, greens, reds, blues. As one friend put it, in Kauai every color is more intense. Greens are greener, the blues are bluer and the reds are redder.

We had a wonderful week and it ended all too quickly. Our final morning in Kauai: We packed up, cleaned up the condo and checked out. Warren returned some of Rebecca’s “treasures” to the beach. She had gathered too many heavy white coral pieces that we really didn’t want to take home with us. He came back but suggested I go say goodbye to the beach. I did and was glad. It made me cry. It was such a wonderful vacation. Before I knew about Kauai I always wanted to go to Hawaii because I just imagined palm trees, beautiful white sand and lots of relaxing beach time. Our vacation was quite a bit different than that but so much more than I could have ever imagined. Seeing God’s beautiful creations was a spiritual experience for me. Words are inadequate to describe the beauty that is there. The people we spoke to, tourists and locals were happy and friendly. The smell of the flowers everywhere was sweet and enjoyable. The weather was perfect. But the thing that suddenly struck me when I got home was this. For one whole week I had left all my worries behind. Warren and I never talked about one thing that was hard or difficult or burdensome. But not only that, it never even occurred to me to talk about these things. I didn’t have to suppress them, they simply weren’t even there. It was like I had truly left the world behind and gone to paradise. No housing worries, no job discussions, no schooling issues, lost house and car keys worries etc etc. I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced anything quite like it. It was hard to say goodbye but Warren kept saying “we have to come back.” That was the only consolation. He loved it as much as I did and wants to go back. We had a wonderful time but there were more things we would love to do someday if we didn’t have the kids with us or had someone with us to watch them for a few hours here or there. At least there are things to look forward to in life.

I feel so incredibly blessed to have experienced this trip. I was thinking about the islands and their isolation and their spirit of “Aloha” and felt like one reason Heavenly Father created these islands is so that people like us could have a taste of paradise and bit of heaven to retreat to when needed.