Four cities, three countries, along for the ride on her sister’s senior trip, junior Alex Dillard ventured with her mom, dad, and sister Mercedes to Europe as a last hurrah before her sister’s ultimate journey to adulthood.
“We always do family trips either over summer or winter break, and none of Mercedes friends could afford to go to Europe alone,” Dillard said, “So she decided she’d rather go with us than go on a cruise with her friends.”
The abundance of travel should have made this trip go smoothly, but sometimes, experience isn’t enough to control a situation.
“The trip was actually kind of hectic. We fly a lot, and normally everything goes smoothly,” Dillard said, “But this time our flight to Dallas got delayed and we almost missed our connecting flight to London. Things like that continued to happen the entire trip. Our flights would all end up either getting delayed or canceled. It was a mess.”
Despite the scare, they made it to lift-off in time, and things started looking up from there.
“The actual plane rides weren’t bad,” Dillard said, “Dallas to London was about eight hours, but you get to watch movies so it goes by pretty quickly. The only bad part is the food [on the plane]. It’s worse than cafeteria food.”
After landing in the first destination, England, the family spent time going through the classic tourist experiences. This included visiting the London eye, Buckingham Palace, and having high tea. However, London proved to be stranger than they had anticipated.
“In England, everyone was so polite, and they had a lot of homeless people, but the weird part was that all the homeless people had pets.” Dillard said, “A lot of them had dogs, one even had a bunny. London sort of reminded me of New York with the whole big-city-bust vibe.”
This feeling juxtaposed against the following day’s destination- Paris, France.
“Paris was more chill.” Dillard said, “and the only time anyone was rude to us for being American was in really nice restaurants, but other than that everyone was nice.”
The final two locations were a little more similar, but infinitely more special to the junior. After taking a speed train, the four arrived in Florence, Italy
“We would be walking down the street and people would literally pull us into their restaurants, and sit you down. If there were two restaurants beside each other they fought for your business,” Dillard said.
Everything was more relaxed there. America dulled in comparison after their return home.
“Everything was better in Italy,” Dillard said, “It was warmer, the food was better, it’s amazing. I miss it.”
