I have an unusual name, with an unusual situation, but a great life. My name is Camille, I am sixteen, a junior at Calumet High School, I’m going to another country for 10 months and I have a family who loves me enough to let me go for a while. I believe everyone should pursue what they love. Whether that is a person, an occupation, a place, or just something off a bucket list. So, this is me, on my pursuit of happiness, which in my mind is kind of like a path: you have two choices. “I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

I like to identify myself as a writer, for I am. Whether I am wrapped up in a pile of blankets with a warm cup of coffee or basking in the sun with a condensing glass of lemonade by my side, I truly love it. I write when inspiration allows, I read avidly, I take photographs to capture and remember and I travel.

I grew up here, in the UP, but besides my parents, my sister, and our dog, we are the only Claytons around. The rest of my family resides out West, the majority of them in Southern California. So of course, every year since I was born, we would fly out to spend time with them. I got used to the short flight from here to Chicago or Minneapolis, and the four-hour flight out to Orange County. It is a part of me. I came to love the plane rides, the atmosphere they possess and how they’re always different. You can meet truly fascinating people on an airplane; all you have to do is ask. Now, I am not a shy person, and ever since I started taking trips on my own, I would strike up a conversation with my seatmates. Some were quiet, not much of conversationalists, but most of them I got lucky with. I met the usuals: men going on, or coming from, business trips, high school kids with a parent checking out colleges as far away from home as possible, families headed to Disney World and the older men and women going to visit their families. But I also met what I like to call the-once-in-a-lifetimes: an old woman with a cannula and air tank, off to New York City so she could fulfill her dream, a man from China meeting his family at the next destination to start a new life with them, and man who was on his way to surprise his girl to propose. Everyone has a story; I was just lucky enough to be there to listen.

I have been through the US – from the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean to Niagara Falls and its ever rushing water, to the rising and falling of the Soo Locks to the enormous Mississippi River, to the never-ending Rocky Mountains to the scooped out Grand Canyon and to the looming forests of Sequoia National Park to end at the salty waters of the Pacific Ocean. I am American and proud to be. And now I think it is time to tell you where I am going, to where I’ll be someone new, instead of someone people know – a place where I will be a foreign exchange student through ASSE/World Heritage, and an ambassador for our great country. I will be just off the Great Barrier Reef in Condon, Queensland, Australia, of course. A place where the hopping kangaroos never cease to exist, the heat will be rippling and experience will be at every turn. And you must know, I am excited (of course), but not nervous. People always seem to be flabbergasted at this remark, for how couldn’t I be? I’m going to a whole new place, for almost a year, where no one knows me. Those things don’t scare me away; they make me want to do it more. I like to call myself an adventure addict. Not the dangerous kind, but the kind who will try almost anything new at least once, almost anything. So this is me, just a girl with an imagination about to embark on her latest adventure. Until next time, be colorful.

Editor’s note:?Camille Clayton is a junior at Calumet HS.