This weekend we had a group of 23 high school students from Parma here in Levanto for an outdoor field trip in the Cinque Terre. We spend a lot of time promoting our field trips specifically because they get the kids outside and moving, which is good for everyone. This means that you have to hope for the weather to cooperate, and this time, the gods were smiling upon us, for after 3 weeks of crappy, drizzly, stormy weather, the skies cleared for two days of hot sun. The worst anyone can complain about is that they got sunburnt.
For us at Voyager, these trips are a ton of fun, because no matter what people say about the younger generations (which are the same things people have always said about the younger generations: lazy, uninspired, spoiled, addicted to technology, etc.), you can’t take away their infectious enthusiasm. Even while they’re complaining about the length of a hike or the lack of nightclubs in Levanto, they’re still doing it with that freshness that helps keep the rest of us young.
It’s like our legendary boat captain Marco says: at 50, he spends more and more time with younger people because they keep him alive, give him new energy and new ideas.
And so we hope that these field trips end up being an equal exchange between generations: we drag the kids out of the city and try to pass on a little wisdom, while they drag us down from our pedestals of being serious grown-ups.
And if they got nothing else out of the experience, at the very least, leaping into the waters of the Mediterranean from the side of a traditional Ligurian fishing boat is always better than being in school.
