Okay, Shaw...Youth Is Wasted On The Young...But Some of Us Were Still Lucky

Geez. I can't even remember the year it was when I was selected as an English Speaking Union Scholar to study at Cambridge University - a summer program for teachers. I know that I was around 27 years old and I recall the trip as being "the last hoorah of my youth." It was outrageous, because we got enough support that I also had time to travel to Denmark, to drive the perimeter of England, Wales, and Ireland, and then arrived to study the Bard for a month. We rented two cars: fist Princess Diana, but she was too big, so we moved to Fergie, who was smaller and easier to control while driving on the wrong side of the road.

Amy Partin, now Ritchie, was my date for the summer. She was celebrating her 30th and I was right behind her (when we returned, she'd find her husband and start a family). We were kids that summer, though, and had a blast.

Nothing meant more, however, than the mixed tapes (remember those?) that we made for one another to listen to as we drove everywhere. We must have listened to them a 1,000 times as we moved from town to town and place to place.

Yesterday, I was looking for photos of when we visited Hamlet's castle in Helsingor, Denmark, when I came across my book that documented the entire experience.

Um, that's not normal. We had a miraculous time and most of it was funded by our scholarship. I look through the album and think, "How the heck can any one ever capture the summer that was that year?" I tried to do so poetically and in a scrapbook (which dons my international driver's license above), but there's no way words could do it justice.

Two English teachers from Kentucky graced with the first generation of Teacher Scholarships to attend classes at Cambridge University with the best of England's Shakespearean Scholars. Hello? Is that a thing? Is it real? And do others travel to Denmark and Ireland, too?

We were young. We were crazy. We were joyful. We were alive.

I look at this now and say, "It is fuel for life."

I could look at that album forever!