Sophie Streleoff recently traveled to Adelboden, Switzerland to represent Girl Guides of Canada at the Helen Storrow Seminar at Our Chalet. Sophie has been traveling from a young age throughout Canada, the United States and Cuba. This trip to Our Chalet was her first trip to Europe. This is the fourth of a four-part blog series about the joys of the various stages of traveling! Don’t forget to read Part I: Tips, Tricks and the Unexpected While Packing, Part II: Keep Calm and Travel On and Part III: Taking in the Experience

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Coming Home to a Different World

Being away from your family and friends for any duration will bring mixed emotions and feelings. You will have missed them and will be excited to see them. However, at the same time it may be difficult to leave your new found friends and experiences.

Making new friends and creating wonderful experiences with them allows connections to be made that can’t be made with others. So when you come home, you may feel like you are in a different world and out of place because those around you don’t quite understand the experience and friendships you created while away. To work through these feelings it is important to stay connected with the new friends that you made. They are the ones you created the experiences with and the only ones you feel may understand you for a bit.

At the same time, it’s also important to share your adventures with your friends and family at home. An easy way to do this is write your experience into a story with a beginning, middle and end; be sure to include some highlights, interesting facts and the new friends and experiences you had! With your story you may also want so share photos to help give people a visual of what you experienced.  A computer slide show or PowerPoint is a fun, interactive way to share your story and experience with others!

Once you come home, you will probably have new ideas and perspectives of many things. Sometimes those new ideas can lead to new adventures and projects. So much like while you were away travelling and keeping your journal, start another journal once you arrive home. This journal can be used as a place to write about your feelings of being home and how things may be different for you. It is also a good place to write down any new ideas you may have. It is important to write these down as it may give you real inspiration when you need it. To keep that feeling of your trip alive, sometimes taking one of those ideas and putting it into action will help your experience continue.

So when you return home, stay connected with your new friends, share your experiences with your old ones and remember that although you may feel you are in a different world, you really aren’t.  Instead, you made your world bigger and more adventurous! Don’t be sad your journey is over, be happy it happened and start planning for the next one!

Sophie

By guest blogger Sophie. Sophie is a young Guider in British Columbia for a multi-Unit of Pathfinders and Rangers. Read Sophie’s other posts for GirlGuidesCANblog, including  A Young Guider’s Advice, Hand prints Instead of Footprints.

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Hello GirlGuidesCANblog reader! Is there a Guiding story or experience you’d like to share with other Members or families? We’d love to hear your ideas!