Switzerland
Technically the first time I left the country was on a trip to Canada in the eighth grade, but having grown up in Maine, Canada wasn’t really a stretch of the imagination. So for all intents and purposes, I consider the first time I stepped on foreign soil to be in 2005, when I traveled to Switzerland. My college had a program over “spring break” (which was in February) and I jumped at the chance to go. A trip was planned with a few days in Switzerland followed by a few days in Ireland.
All these years later I can only remember a few of the small details. We stayed at a hospitality school on a lake in the small town of Le Bouveret, close to the French border. Because of my name, the school assumed I was a boy and put me in a shared room with other boys. When I arrived with my group, they told me there were no more shared rooms available for a girl and I would have to be by myself in a suite facing the lake and mountains. I didn’t complain. My group went out and drank at the town’s popular club with the local hospitality students, tasted wine in a very old basement and tried a Swiss favorite, fondue, at a very fancy restaurant on top of a mountain. While all the details of the trip are hazy to me now, I can remember exactly how it felt being in a far away land for the first time and breathing in air that just smelled and felt different. It’s a feeling I crave all the time and the biggest reason I long for travel.
I remember being on the plane over to Switzerland and being a little disappointed that we were only spending one day in Geneva at the end of the trip. In my not-well-traveled head, I thought what was the point of going to a country if you weren’t going to spend time in the most popular city? After we arrived in our small town on the lake, I realized that what I was seeing and experiencing around me was something I would have never experienced in Geneva. When I travel now, I always like to make sure I have one place to visit that won’t be full of tourists and those experiences have been some of my favorites. We did spend a few hours in Geneva before we drove to our small town and in that time I ordered my first legal drink at a bar, a whiskey sour. It came with a little hot-pink lady stirring stick which I still have today.
While I did get to briefly view the Matterhorn (though pictures were impossible to take), see the famous fountain in Lake Geneva as well as the flags lining the front lawn of the UN building, I don’t recall much else about the city. I did buy my one and only souvenir in Geneva, a red Swiss Army Knife, which I still have, somewhere.
Even though I’ve traveled around quite a bit since this trip, Switzerland is still one of my favorites. Maybe it’s the shape of the mountains, maybe it’s the way I remember how the air felt when I stepped off the plane, or maybe it’s simply because it’s the first real foreign place I visited. Whatever the reason, Switzerland will always hold a special place in my heart and I hope to adventure there again.

