Hey guys!

Just wanted to fill you in on what’s buzzing with the bugs! Our plans have changed and we are no longer traveling together to Africa this summer as the World Travel Bugs. However, the Butterfly, Bee, and Firefly (Shelley, Sierra, and Tyler) have further to fly and will be going their own separate ways this summer.

We will be sure to let you know about our upcoming adventures as they unfold!

Sierra will be Commercial Fishing in the high seas of Alaska. You can follow her epic journey at The Real Alaska.

Shelley is currently working in South Africa for the summer as a teacher for a local village school. Stay tuned for updates! Check out her most recent journey through the Promised Land, Israel, at The World Travel Bugs

See what Tyler is up to at TyWilliamsPhotography.com and for some incredible and inspiring photography.

Thanks for checking in. We look forward to hearing from you!!!

Shelley, Sierra,  Tyler and Cody

shelley.smsmith@gmail.com

sierraganderson@gmail.com

tywwilliams@gmail.com

In the meantime we hope you…

Sit back

Relax

Grab a beverage (or two)

Maybe pop some popcorn

Keep this site on your home page

RELIVE the adventures

And get some ideas for YOUR own future TRAVEL EXPERIENCE!

On a gray and misty morning, my heart was broken and mended again on a long walk.

The air was thick and damp, heavy. The further I walked, the heavier I became.


This was Auschwitz.

A death camp where over 1.1 million people perished through no fault of their own.

From this “factory of death,” crumbling two hours outside of Krakow, Poland, three crematoriums, gas chambers, barracks, watch towers, and barbed wire fences remain.

The evil and hatred that once claimed this site is still palapable here. It’s alive even in death. The walls, the cobblestones, the towers, the gates, everything on the grounds is worn raw from the suffering of four years spent in hell.

Walking beneath the rusted entrance gate brandished with the words “Arbeit Macht Fret,” “Work Brings Freedom,” I can only imagine standing here 60 years earlier; staring at those scarring words overhead, hopeful I was being “resettled,” and holding on to a sliver of hope that I may one day be free.

Any able working person 13 years and older would have passed through here. The other 70 to 75 percent of people too old, young, or weak to work were killed upon arrival.

I am not the first 22-year-old girl to pass under these gates. I imagine tracing the steps of the girl walking here 60 years ago. Same steps, but different walks. My walk was a tour, hers was a march to death.

Only time made the difference.

We approached a gas chamber that doubled as a crematorium, and as we filed through in a single line, I flashed to the time when those who walked in to this cold and gray crumbling coffin would never come out. Yet I did.

Only time made the difference.

Kicking my feet through the dust, shuffling from barrack to watchtower in the gray drizzle, watching the dark fragments settle on the earth, I wondered if there were human remains still among the ruins.

Ashes from dead prisoners were used as fertilizer on the grounds.

I scanned the rooms within the retired prisoner cell blocks that held saved artifacts from the camp. Two tons of prisoners’ hair, only a fraction of the true amount collected by the Nazis, lie in dusty tangled heaps beyond the glass.

Hair was used to make cloth.

My nails scratch along the thick window panes which hold the confiscated suitcases, baby shoes, eyeglasses, brushes, and other personal belongings of prisoners.

These are real things. These were real people. This really happened…here.

Yet I come out the other side.

All because of time.

It is time that has caused us to realize what we’ve done to each other. Time that’s allowed us to preserve this part of history. And through time, we can only learn to not repeat our past.

The backpack; Our identitiy, our resúmé, our personality. All spelled out in an object. With it, we are a community, one people. We’re travelers who leave our homes, our country, our comfort to go, to do. To get lost, to make mistakes, to seek adventure, the unknown.
We are backpackers.

We are not afraid. We are open to experience, to the new to the different. We are learners, we are leaders, or seek to become them. We thrive from conversation about our differences our similarities our hopes our dreams; dreams for ourselves, for our countries, for the world. We are do-ers and dreamers.
We are backpackers.

We are restless in the quest to see more to learn more to be more than we are. Seldom do we know where we’re going, what to expect when we get there. But we do expect one thing; the unexpected. We expect to be uncomfortable and unfamiliar with where we are. But somehow that sense of unfamiliarity, that feeling of out of place…it’s right. It’s where we’re supposed to be.

We seek each other out. Seek out each other’s advice, comfort, encouragement, friendship. We want to help each other, to share stories and experiences, to grow from one another. There are moments when you are lower than you ever thought you could be; you’re physically and mentally finished and feel your exhaustion and frustration taking you over, swallowing you up. In these moments, you see a backpack, anywhere, and you clamor to connect. He or she becomes your source for revitilization, for emotional nourishment, for direction. Your lifeline.

Hostels become a refuge, your battery charger, the closest thing to family and familiarity. They’re filled with pockets of people doing the same thing you are. Many solo, many in small groups eager to meet each other, share remarkable travel tales and contacts in whatever places they’ve been, offer ideas of how to take your journey farther, deeper.

We may not look anything alike, speak a different language, come from opposite ends of world. But because of the backpack, you know each other already. You know you’re made of the same stuff.

It’s like picking up on a former conversation, little introduction required.

Home no longer becomes a place but people. On a train, at the bus station, at a hostel, or roaming the streets of a foreign city. The backpack is home. We’re home in each other, wherever we are.