I’ve always been a bit strange. As a child, I collected trash. Like old Reese’s wrappers. I’m not sure if I felt bad for the poor thing not having any chocolate-covered peanut butter left in it, or if I thought the wrapper was pretty, or what. All I know is I gave literal meaning to one’s man trash is Brianna’s treasure.
    
I also used to say goodbye (mentally in my head) to my hair when I’d get it cut at the salon. And I named the hair, too. ‘Bye, Joey!’ ‘Bye, Rebecca!’ all through the appointment.
    
I’ve outgrown those, for the record, but I’ve kept the strangeness and embraced it… Because a lot of the strangosities have placed me in situations where I’ve learned a lesson or two about life, and there’s nothing wrong with a little more knowledge.
    
Collecting trash (that my mom would toss the instant I brought it in) taught me to not litter – after all, at 5 years old I didn’t want someone collecting my Reese’s wrapper and depriving me of its ownership. And saying goodbye to my hair taught me that sometimes the little things do matter.
    
That knowledge may not take me too far in life –after all I don’t think ‘throws trash out’ and ‘remembers the little things’ are skills someone could endorse me for on LinkedIn (you can try though)- but it can make you a better person with a few interesting stories about how you learned it. And what better time to learn than on vacation – when you least expect to.

Laugh At Your Self

Perhaps it’s the blonde hair, but I’m not always the brightest. When I was 10, I received my first super cool bar of deodorant while on vacation. I was such a badass, all grown up enough to wear deodorant. In fact, I was so badass I put it on everywhere that I sweat. Armpits, back of the knees, forehead – I legitimately thought those were all appropriate uses. Excitedly I went to tell my family that my forehead wasn’t sweating anymore. They stared at me strangely before breaking out in laughter at my mistake. Oh how they laughed and laughed, and they still laugh. They’re laughing right now, in fact.
    
At the time I was mortified. My dreams of being this mature girl were laughed upon. As time passed, I realized coming of age isn’t easy, and sometimes you just have to laugh and be thankful digital cameras didn’t exist at the time to catch the white streak across my forehead.

It’s Okay to Be Scared

I’ve vacationed a week of every summer of my life in the village of Port Austin, Michigan – a small lakeside town in the Thumb. Because of this, I know the land so well I could walk it blind. Or so, I used to think. Each summer brings new changes to the area, and one of them unfortunate.
    
My friend and I went to go do a little rock hopping across some large boulders when all the sudden a large, ugly bird started hissing at us from an alcove in the rocks. It took a step towards us and sent us running for the hills. What the hell was that?
    
It was a turkey vulture protecting its nest, and has since made home there for the past 8 years. Hissing and squawking at those who dare to go near. Needless to say, rock hopping has lost its appeal in that area because you don’t forget a turkey vulture chasing you.

Impossible Is An Imaginative State of Mind

Some people lose bikini bottoms while tubing and need to be rescued with a towel. Others (read: not me, my friend) lose diamond earrings at the bottom of Lake Huron. You’d expect yellow bikini bottoms would pop out amongst blue waters. But you wouldn’t expect someone to wear real diamond earrings into a lake, and you sure as hell wouldn’t expect them to find the earrings on the bottom of the lake.
    
Lake Huron is a pretty clear lake with sandy bottoms, but still, it’s a Great Lake.  Water moves, sand shifts; it was, in our minds, a lost cause. Hope for finding the earrings was laughable to everyone but my friend. She wanted those earrings back and would not take ‘impossible’ for an answer.
    
She found a pair of goggles and spent her day diving down to the bottom of Lake Huron to, lo and behold, find her earrings.
    
We ate our words in disbelief that she defied the impossible and found her diamond earrings on the bottom of the lake. And there I was wondering why my bikini bottoms hadn’t even washed to shore…

Breakfast Is An Important Meal

Before my family heads out on vacation, we like to eat all our food up so that nothing spoils or stales while we’re gone. As children, my brother and I were picky eaters and often had trouble the day we left for vacation because we wouldn’t have anything to eat of real substance. Often, candy became the choice till we stopped for fast food lunch.
    
One vacation, our candy-breakfast was licorice. Normally, not ones to get carsick, the licorice messed with our stomachs and my brother and I puked all over my dad’s backseat, and more unfortunately, around my brother’s friend who sat between us. It was puke city in the Yukon. And the more my brother and I puked, the more it smelled and made us want to puke more.
    
That day we learned candy sucked for breakfast, and that we had to get over being picky so we wouldn’t vomit everyone out of the car.

Believe In Yourself   

I’m a bit of a chicken shit. The idea of jumping off a 20 foot tall boulder into 8 feet deep water sounds like a death wish. Especially when you add in the fact that you must jump precisely in the direction of 11 o’clock to avoid rocks in the water. But even as a chicken shit, I also believe you should (occasionally) try things that scare you. And for me, that was jumping off a 20 foot boulder.
    
Standing on the edge, my legs turned to jello and my heart felt like it was going to fall out my butt and beat me to the water. The spot we needed to jump to looked too far away and too far down, made more threatening in that I could see the bottom clear as day. Spotters stood in the water on rocks, their bodies half out of water.
    
To overcome the fear, I chanted ‘I think I can, I think I can, I know I can, I know I can’ to charge up my confidence and squash my fears. I made the leaping plunge of fear. Or after I surfaced from the water, the leaping plunge of awesome. It was enthralling and all it took was a little belief in myself.
    
I knew I could.

What lessons have you learned on vacation?

Brianna Krueger is the Chief Editor for Wandering Educators

All photos courtesy and copyright Brianna Krueger