"No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow."

Tower Bridge, London

Cardiff, Wales

Hamish, the Highland Cow, Scotland

London Eye

Eiffel Tower, Paris

Urquhart Castle, Loch Ness, Scotland

British Library, London

“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” - Miriam Beard

“Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quiestest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” - Pat Conroy

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” - G. K. Chesterton

Yes, I love quotations. They come the closest to articulating feelings I cannot translate into words. I can throw around the words "amazing, wonderful, awesome" etc. all day long, but I cannot effectively demonstrate how I have been permanently altered. Before this trip, I longed to travel; now, I know I must never stop.

I have also cemented my love for librarianship/information science. I know I have chosen the right profession, and I cannot wait to have a job in this field. I'm interested in federal and international librarianship, when before I had never really even considered them. I'm still interested in academic and public libraries, of course. But my options seem absolutely endless now. If you're a potential British Studies student, or even just a potential traveler, my advice is this - do it. Go. THIS opportunity, the one you're considering right now. If you don't have one, make one. If you don't have the money (I didn't), get a loan. I have experienced so many things in one month that I never thought I would do in a lifetime, and the stories are too many for this blog. So I would encourage you to go have your own adventures, and maybe I'll see you there.

"The fact is, that to do anything in the world worth doing, we must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in and scramble through as well as we can." - Robert Cushing

"Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself and dares to become involved with experimenting with his own life." - Herbert Otto