Last week I wrote about my niece Emily’s trip to Thailand, and within a few days of that post, my nephew Andy was on his way to Europe for a nine-day tour of Paris, Switzerland and Germany with a group from his high school. While this was Andy’s first trip abroad, Emily has been overseas before. As a freshman in high school, she traveled with the Oregon Children’s Choir and Youth Chorale to France, performing with that group in Paris and at the American Cemetary in Normandy. My own daughters also began their international travels before they were out of high school (not counting a few trips north into Canada, just a few hours’ drive from our home in the Seattle area). Sarah went on a church youth mission trip to Mexico. Her little sister got her first passport stamp when we traveled to England and Scotland to visit Sarah while she studied abroad during her sophomore year in college. Jenny followed that excursion up a few years later when she journeyed to Cologne, Germany, for the 2005 World Youth Day gathering. It got me thinking about how many more opportunities there are for youth today to travel abroad than existed when I was a teenager. In the ’70s, we of course had high school foreign exchange programs, but even in the large suburban high schools I attended, those rarely involved more than perhaps a dozen students a year. Sports and arts programs might offer a trip to the Rose Parade in Pasadena for the band or an exhibition game in a neighboring state, but extended trips were fairly uncommon, and overseas trips were simply unheard of. Kids my age who  traveled to Europe (forget more exotic destinations like Asia or Africa) were generally from fairly well-to-do families and traveled with their parents. Nowadays, students who are involved in church, music and sports programs are far more likely to have the chance to travel to foreign lands. Family income doesn’t necessarily restrict such opportunities, as scholarships and fundraisers ensure that everyone participates. This provides them with those benefits we all recognize come from experiencing new places, ideas and cultures. The fact that they may do so with supervision, but not necessarily of the parental variety, means they are stretched to rely more on themselves and their inner resources as they encounter these new experiences. Parents may fret nowadays about how quickly their children must grow up or the amount of pressure they face with jam-packed schedules and too many activities, but the greater access to foreign travel for a broader range and number of students is one of the best things kids today enjoy. — Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor