Castaway

Last weekend, Minnesota students were once again rewarded with MEA break. MEA is a long weekend given to Minnesota K-12 students every year while a state-wide teachers’ conference is being held. Each year, our church youth group spends MEA up at camp Castaway. We eat good food, stay up too late, sing and worship together, play silly games and laugh a lot.  The camp is in up-north Minnesota, near Detroit Lakes, right in the middle of Minnesota lake country. It’s surrounded by three lakes that are lined with houses and summer cabins and thick forests, and this rural location left me in awe. Every time you stepped outside, you’d breathe in crisp, fresh air, and know that you were somewhere special. You’d see the trees beautifully flaunting reds, oranges and yellows around the camp. And at night, the sunset would cast stunning colors over the lakes, and

Minneapolis: Tourist for the Day

Who says you need to travel far to be a tourist? I live just outside of Minneapolis (yes, in the suburbs, I know, how boring…), but we don’t make it deep into the city very often unless we’re catching a concert or going to an event. Yesterday, we decided to spend the day touring Minneapolis like we had never before set foot inside the city limits. So my mom, my younger sister and her friend and I headed out into the city to be tourists for the day. Of course, you can’t cover all of Minneapolis in one day, but we did as much as we could fit into one afternoon and night.

The North Shore

For Minnesotans, like me, the North Shore refers to the stretch of land bordering Lake Superior in northern Minnesota. It’s one of my favorite areas in all of Minnesota. Lots of nature, but also home to Duluth, a beautiful city right on Lake Superior’s coast. For those who don’t know, Lake Superior is one of the Great Lakes. It’s so vast that it seems like an ocean sometimes; you can’t see straight across it, and instead the water reaches to the horizon. My family loves to travel up here to visit Duluth, or go skiing or camping.

Duluth is so perfect because it combines metropolitan life with nature and beautiful scenery of Lake Superior’s shore. Duluth is also major port city, so it has picturesque

Traveling Teen

I’m 16 yrs old, a high school student. You might ask how a high school student has the time and opportunity to run a travel blog. I ask this myself from time to time. I accredit most of my travel to parents’ love of travel. They’ve taken my siblings and me to the ends of the earth and back, and I couldn’t be more grateful. When my mom travels, she meets people from around the world and develops connections. Connections that last even today and bring us back to those places where the connections were made. She has friends and connections in France, Seattle, Montreal, Guatemala to name a few, and she’s drawn back to those places with the promise of seeing an old friend (not to mention free lodging), and

Canoeing in the Boundary Waters

Last weekend we headed up to the Boundary Waters for a little canoeing and camping trip. The Boundary Waters is definitely a one of a kind place. It’s a chain of lakes that that sits right on the boarder between Minnesota and Canada, hence the Boundary Waters. Campsites are set up around the lakes, but the only way to reach them is by canoe. So we loaded up our canoes with supplies, and set off on a two hour canoe trip to reach the campground. It was an adventure!

As luck would have it, it was a rainy weekend. The canoe trip into the campground was filled with on and off rain, as was the first night camping. That first night in the rain I was
wishing for the magic tents used in Harry Potter. The ones that don’t seem to be much