4,000 Miles to Illinois

I remember my eighth grade class trip. We sold candy bars all year to pay for a full day at Six Flags in St. Louis. A two-hour bus ride, a dozen rides on the roller-coasters, a two-hour bus ride back, and we were home by 8 pm.

I came across an article today about a sixth-grade class that visited the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield. To pay for their trip, the class hosted “fiddle dances, cakewalks, basketball tournaments, bake sales, and raffles.” In the end, each student also had to put up $500 of their own money to offset the costs of travel. The trip cost a whopping $18,000. Now I know tickets to the ALPLM aren’t that expensive, so what’s the deal?

Well, the class was from a remote village in western Alaska! After learning about the American Civil War during the school year, they traveled 4,000 miles to Illinois and plan on spending the next week touring the various Lincoln sites throughout the state.

If you run into the thirteen sixth graders and two teachers from Ket’acik Aap’alluk Memorial School in Kwethluk, Alaska, congratulate them for working so hard to get to Illinois!