BY PAIGE GRIESSE (’15)

Imagine traveling the world, experiencing new cultures, foods and beautiful scenery. Having the luxury of doing this doesn’t come for all of us, just a limited few.

Leigh Chessher has been one of the very few who has had the opportunity to experience all of these amazing things, traveling to as many as six countries and over fifteen states, she feels that she has been exposed to so much already.

“With all of the traveling I have done it really has made a well-rounded person and has given me the experience of a life time,” Chessher said.

Traveling wasn’t just a recent thing to appear in Chessher’s life. She was born in Guatemala and lived in Honduras for two years. Then she headed to Mexico for the next five years until she finally came to the states.

“I started traveling at a young age which I am thankful for, most kids never even leave their hometown until they are about seven or eight which at that point I had been three different places” Chessher said with a laugh, “It just makes me feel different and very lucky to have had these opportunities,”

Her most recent trip was a couple of months ago to Hong Kong to visit her dad. They later headed over to Vietnam to stay in a breath-taking villa. Not only did she get to do many things there such as canoeing in the ocean, but she also got to go zip lining in the jungle.

“Zip lining was probably one of the coolest things I have ever done when traveling, you really get to see the beauty of nature from up above,” said Chessher. Her favorite part of traveling is seeing what beauty nature brings that humans tend to overlook.

Apart from doing cool things in these foreign countries, Chessher’s next favorite thing is to try exotic foods. Leigh has tried foods ranging from mangos to snails and even duck tongue.

“I admit I have tried some really disturbing foods, but a couple of my favorites have been the mango stem and the snail both of which I had in Vietnam,”

Chessher feels that trying these exotic foods makes her feel like a more diverse person.

Chessher plans to use traveling in her future. The next place she would like to go would preferably be Greece where she can do some site seeing, learn to surf and hope to find a sexy Greek man.

She plans to use traveling in her future; she would love to learn many new languages such as Mandarin and also would love to help teach kids in other countries.

“I can’t wait to see what the future holds for me. Hopefully it’s somewhere beautiful.”