During the 2024-2025 high school basketball season, we picked up a second foreign exchange student. Her host family had apparently asked for two students who played basketball in an attempt to bolster the girls program at a very small neighboring school. Their personalities differed, so they kept the one with the better basketball skills and asked the foreign exchange student coordinating company to re-home the one that wasn’t really helping the basketball team the way they had hoped. Rather than see the poor kid sent home early, we offered our home for the remainder of the year.

I had been planning for some time to take our family on a trip to some domestic location, particularly for the benefit of the exchange students. We have been to most of the places worth visiting within a day’s drive of our home. I considered New Orleans, but that would probably have involved flying the Mooney, and we could not all fit in that. Ultimately, we decided to make a fairly close copy of our Spring Break 2020 trip, made just under the wire as Covid-19 made its way across the country and the nation was just trying to come to grips with what to do about it.

Since we did not have school the Friday leading into Spring Break of 2025, my plan was to drive down that morning to Fredericksburg and walk around the old shops in that town. If anyone (other than Caleb and I) was interested in the Museum of the Pacific War, we could spend a couple of hours there. We’d head on in to San Antonio for the night. We could see the Alamo, the missions, take in a Spurs game, visit the River Walk, and do any of the other various parks, zoos, and attractions available there. On Tuesday, we would drive down to Port Aransas and spend a few nights on the Texas coast in an AirBnB.

This trip would prove to be a bit different from previous journeys. This time we had two exchange students. They have quite different personalities, and neither of them gets along very well with our high school daughter, Kimberly, who would turn 16 while we were on the trip. I suppose having three teenage girls in the house at once is asking for problems. I get along well with each of them one-on-one. They are all quite different, though, and have different personalities and preferences. Exchange students in general seem to be more open to new experiences than the average teenage kid. That had been our experience with our previous adopted family members. Paula from Spain can be a “go with the flow” kid, but Stacy from Taiwan grew up as an only child, and has some strongly held preconceived ideas.

Stacy is from Taipei, a city of several million people. Coming to extreme rural West Texas had to be a big adjustment. She clearly misses the city. She has phobias of insects, does not like what she calls “nature,” and does not have much affinity for “old things.” Would the allure of visiting a city like San Antonio be to her liking? Could she learn to appreciate the “old things” in San Antonio, like the missions and the Alamo? I figured Paula would appreciate the heavy Spanish influence. It would be interesting to see how they would react.