Perhaps one of the most exciting things that students look forward to at Eagan High School is the trips that are available to them. From the Eagan band planning to travel to Italy, an open trip to New Zealand and Australia, and The Eagan choir soon to be announcing their destination, there is a wide array of excursions to interest everyone. Language classes are known to have spectacular trips to countries that speak the language. Normally, Spanish class students will go to a Spanish speaking country and French class students will go to France, but for the upcoming trip in 2022, this may change.

An idea has been proposed that French and Spanish trips should be combined, where one half of the trip would be in Spain and the other half would be in France. Upon speaking with French teacher Mrs. Hubbard, she said, “They’re going to get to go see the other country, they would have less time in their country. The pro is that they’re going to see a whole other country and culture and travel with friends in the other language.” 

Why was this combined trip considered in the first place? Mrs. Hubbard said there were two reasons, “So many kids have asked if that was something we would consider, and having missed the last trip because of COVID, we decided we would make ours be different and more inclusive to be able to have a bigger group travel at once.” A survey released by Spanish and French teachers found that about 75% of students like the idea of a combined trip.

A big part of language trips are family stays. These are when a student stays with a host family who speaks the language they are taking in school. According to Mrs. Hubbard, this opportunity will stay the same. “It will be a 12 days trip, the kids will miss three days of school. The family stay falls during a weekend so they can do more fun things.”

All of the trips offered at Eagan High School are amazing, but it is exciting to see a possible combination of the Spain/French trips. Not only will students be able to travel with their friends in other language classes, but they will get to experience a whole other culture. None of this is official yet, but hopefully soon we will know for sure what the language trips will look like. It will be especially fun after a long pandemic to travel to a new and beautiful place.