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| Memorable trip ends with tonight’s return |
By: Glenda H. Caudle Special Features Editor
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Posted: Tuesday, June 30, 2009 9:01 pm
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By GLENDA H. CAUDLE
Special Features Editor
Did the dream match the reality?
The families of the eight Union City High School students who have spent five months anticipating and 12 days actually traveling to and through Europe and exploring seven foreign countries on an all-expense-paid trip will hear that answer first-hand when the students return to Union City around 8:30 tonight. This final day of their Union City Rotary Club-sponsored adventure, funded by an anonymous donor working through the club, actually took the students and their chaperones, UCHS vice principal Jacob Cross and his wife, Emily, into an eighth country when their flight from Paris deposited them in Amsterdam this morning. While the students can now actually claim to have been in eight European countries — England, where the trip began, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland and France — their Netherlands visit will be confined to the airport and there will be no time for exploring their environs before they board another plane to fly back to Memphis. At that midsouth airport, they will be met by a big yellow school bus from the Union City School System and transported to Reelfoot Animal Clinic on West Reelfoot Avenue in Union City — their departure point June 19.
Students originally met at that location on a hot summer morning, decked out in their distinctive Rotary Club rugby shirts and shouldering their identical backpacks with the Rotary emblem. Dr. Leland Davis, owner of the clinic and leader, along with Clay Woods, of the volunteer committee that planned the trip on behalf of the Rotary Club and the anonymous donor, had offered students the opportunity to weigh their “checkable” baggage on his large scale to avoid any last minute over-the-limit luggage surprises at the airport.
On their return trip, however, the students will be trusting to good luck that their foreign purchases have not exceeded the airline’s specifications.
Traveler Andrew Speed made the final “official” call home to his mom, Amanda Barnett, at 1:40 a.m. today (local time) from the airport in Paris. The UCHS entourage had left their hotel about 6:45 a.m. (Paris time) and taxied to the airport, where they dug in for the requisite two-hour wait before boarding their flight for the first leg of the journey home.
Because of the great expense of cell phone communication between home and abroad and because trip planners wanted to ensure the students devoted their time to exploring and absorbing their surroundings rather than chatting with home-bound family and friends about what they were seeing, the group was allowed to utilize only one phone. That was provided by CELLPAGE in Fulton, who also paid for the minutes for the single call home each day. Families established a calling tree to inform each other of the day’s report, which usually came in late in the afternoon (Union City time), just before the group called it a night in their various locations.
Speed, who fell in love with London on the first stop of the trip, also had high words of praise for Paris, where the group left their official Cosmos tour Sunday afternoon and explored on their own for a day and a half. According to his mom, he was extremely tired after only about four hours sleep but was still excited about the adventure he and his classmates have shared.
Those Purple and Gold traveling companions have included Whitney Smith, Will Arnold, Chambry Callicott, Katey Crews, Kayla Eason, Paige Fisher and Katelyn Ray, plus the Crosses.
Miss Fisher made the travel call on Sunday evening from Paris, where the group had arrived earlier in the afternoon, and informed her grandmother, Anita Fisher, that “everything is wonderful. I can’t tell you how wonderful it is here.” The students had already visited the Eiffel Tower and The Louvre but, according to the exuberant young student, “there was so much more than we had time to see.”
She was also elated about the time spent in Switzerland. “It was just like ‘Heidi,’” she reported of their time in the area around Lucerne. The story from her childhood has, according to her grandmother, always been a favorite, and the actuality of the beautiful mountains that are a setting for the story met expectations — and then some.
The students will be preparing a special presentation about their trip once they get home and will be presenting it to the Rotary Club and their fellow students and to other groups who might be interested. The Messenger plans a special Friends and Neighbors feature next week, as well.
Trip planners say they hope to begin working on another adventure for area students right away.
Published in The Messenger 6.30.09 |
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