I took an overnight train from Prague to Kraków and, thus, was able to get started in Poland fairly early. While in Kraków, I was able to see several important historical sites and during my second day in Poland, I visited the infamous Auschwitz Concentration Camp. It was a moving experience and truly brings home the horrors of the Holocaust.

After spending some time in the Netherlands, I took a short flight over to Prague. I had been wanting to go to the city since a number of friends went on about how great it was while on my semester abroad back in 2009. This was also my first trek into a country that was once completely within the old Eastern bloc.

For my last of three Spring Break trips in a row, I decided to start in The Netherlands. While I spent most of my time in Amsterdam, I did venture out into the country a little bit. I wanted to go to The Hague being that it is the center of many international organizations and then Doorn, where the Kaiser lived out his life in exile after the First World War.

In 2018, I helped chaperone a school trip to Boston and Cambridge and it was quite the experience. While it was not as cold as Boston can get during the Winter months, the Southern California students did get to enjoy a small snowstorm blow through and blanket the city in white.

After being away for a while, and at the suggestion of a neighbor, we decided to take a trip back to Cabo San Lucas. This time, however, it wasn’t just my immediate family, by my cousin and his wife as well as our neighbor’s family. Because of this, it was a great time all around down on the southern tip of the Baja peninsula.

Even before the Second World War, Normandy was rich in history, but after 1944, the beaches of Normandy took on a special significance in the fight against fascism and tyranny. On June 6, 1944, the allied forces of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, and other landed on these beaches to free, not only France, but the whole of Western Europe from the grip of Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

After the capital in Madrid, Barcelona is Spain’s second largest city and is full of history, but has an uncertain future. As the capital of the Catalonia Autonomous Region, the city is often caught in the middle of Spanish authorities and Catalonian separatists. Barcelona itself has a large number of Catalan and Spanish unionists while the countryside is much more nationalistic. Fortunately, there was no major conflict while I was there.

Because Morocco is so incredibly close to places like Gibraltar and Tarifa, I decided to take a day trip across the Strait of Gibraltar to the Moroccan City of Tangier. As a whole, Morocco is an interesting place being that, while it was never formally colonized like, say the British Raj in India, parts of the country did come under the influence of the Spanish and French.