Beautiful People, Breathtaking Sights
By Taylon Knorpp | June 1, 2017
At the beginning of Youth Tour, we heard nonstop that this was the “trip of a lifetime” and that we needed to take advantage of it. We, not knowing what we were getting into, easily discarded that.
We didn’t like waking up early and running on five hours of sleep. We didn’t like standing and walking for hours on end while the heat and humidity left an exact sweat imprint of our Youth Tour backpacks.
As we got further into our trip, the friends that we made in Austin turned into great friends.
We viewed the beautiful monuments erected to commemorate the most important people in United States history. We stood where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his I Have a Dream speech. We stood at the base in awe at the gigantic Jefferson, Washington and Lincoln memorials. We walked through in amazement at Washington’s home on Mount Vernon and the Smithsonians. We relished the pure history radiating from the Declaration of Independence in the National Archives.
Once we started forming these everlasting friendships and witnessing these beautiful ceremonies and monuments, it made every single morning worth it. My friends and I looked forward to waking up and seeing the bags under our eyes and comparing hideous bed-heads. By the end of the trip, I couldn’t imagine living life without all of the beautiful people I befriended on Youth Tour, and I will never forget all of the breathtaking sights I was fortunate enough to see with my own eyes.
I don’t care how many times it has been said and how cliché it may sound now, the only accurate way to describe Youth Tour is by saying it is the trip of a lifetime.
Taylon Knorpp, sponsored by Greenbelt EC in 2016, graduates high school in 2017 and plans to pursue a journalism or business degree at Texas State University or Stephen F. Austin State University.