Homer High School teachers Erin and Josh Brege and 17 students traveled to Croatia, Slovenia and Italy during Spring Break of 2026. The students will present highlights from the trip with Friends of the Homer Library at the library on Tuesday April 14th starting at 6 pm. High School Senior McKenzie Hansen shared basic details of the trip with KBBI at a meeting at Homer High School last Friday.
Hansen said that the 12 day Europe trip was organized by teachers about a year ago and was coordinated with a program called Explorica that assists teachers in planning international travel and provides a tour director who Hansen explained "was with us every step of the way just to make sure that things ran smoothly.” This wasn’t Hansen’s first trip to Europe but it was for many of the students, she said.
The group left Anchorage for Denver and then made the international flight to Frankfort, Germany and then Dubrovnik, Croatia; the first stop on their tour.
“We stayed in the old town area, which was pretty small; but people still live there …The cool thing about this place was there were these medieval city walls, and we got to walk along the top,” Hansen said.
The group of students moved about every two days, with each day packed with events but still enough time for personal reflection. After Dubrovnik, the group traveled to Plitvice and then Lublijana before heading to Venice in Italy and ended the tour in Rome.
In Rome, the first day, we did, a lot of walking around. We saw the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, Piazza Navona, the Pantheon…we just kind of walked around. And then the second day, we went to the Vatican, Saint Peter's Basilica and the Coliseum. That was the day that we just got dumped on. We're very wet most of that day, but it was really cool,” Hansen said.
“Another cool thing was that there was a really good balance of city life and also nature. We went to the Plitvice lakes and waterfalls. And it was really, really beautiful, just cool.”
“What was your favorite spot?”
“That’s a hard question. I think my favorite spot might have been split where Diocletian's Palace was. We weren't there very long, but it was really cool to walk inside the palace walls, and there were still shops and restaurants. It's very lively, and there's lots to do there,” Hansen responded.
Diocletian’s Palace is the feature where Hansen chose to conduct her independent research and she’ll be presenting more on this at the Tuesday evening event at the Homer library.
“What was the weather like…and temperatures?”
“It was about 50 to 60 degrees, and we had beautiful weather the whole time. It was perfect, like a T-shirt or like light sweater weather, which was nice. And then we came back here and it was freezing, except for, I think the last day that we were in Rome, it poured rain all day, which apparently is unusual for them,” Hansen said.
In the next school year, Hansen will be participating in a program called Education First: Gap Year. This is a 24-week global program where post-high school students travel for a year prior to beginning college education. Students choose from any of the program’s 11 international language campuses. This is described on the program website as: “A two-term journey ideal for students who want to see more of the world, deepen their cultural perspective, and grow far beyond the classroom.” Hansen will spend the 2026-27 school year in Costa Rica, Italy, Japan and Spain.
Reporting from Homer, this is Emilie Springer.
A full transcript with additional comments from McKenzie Hansen will be available on the KBBI website.
