![\"\"](\"https:\/\/stuorgs2.gcc.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2026\/09\/2025-10-10-26-homegoing-1-v2.jpg\")
While Grove City was just beginning to buzz in anticipation of 2025’s Homecoming festivities, I was catching a transatlantic flight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a study abroad student this fall, with a full load of English classes at Oxford University, I am fulfilling a childhood dream \u2013 but also battling a small amount of FOMO. After all, fall semester at Grove \u2013 especially Homecoming season \u2013 is full of old school traditions and new connections with the incoming freshmen and hundreds of visitors popping up around campus for sporting events.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There’s a reason so many alumni come back every fall. Grove is a special place, and one worth missing when we are away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While flying “across the pond,” I had an extensive layover in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland. I picked up a book entitled “Questions of Travel” \u2013 a modern reprint of Victorian travel-writer William Morris’s journal as he explored Iceland for two months in 1871. I was imagining an adventure chronicle akin to Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” but the little book surprised me. The narrator was no intrepid adventurer, goal clearly etched in mind, prepared to battle any adversity that may confront him. Instead, William Morris is a timid man, easily annoyed \u2013 by seasickness, or a bad night of sleep on rough ground, or conflicts of personality between himself and his travel companions. He enjoys many aspects of the trip \u2013 in fact, he has a keen eye for finding mundane beauty (a flower, a sunset, a pleasant sound of a pot “tinkling” against other objects in his backpack). But he also sometimes wonders why he has come at all. “I felt as if I should have been glad of any accident that would have kept me at home,” he moans at one point early in the adventure. The title for the volume is drawn from the title of an Elizabeth Bishop poem \u2013 incidentally, one of my favorite poems. In Bishop’s poem, she prods why we feel the need to travel in the first place: “What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life \/ in our bodies, we are determined to rush \/ to see the sun the other way around?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When put in such brusque language, travel does seem to be unnecessary and even childish \u2013 what are we accomplishing there that we could not just have easily accomplished here? Why did William Morris spend two months eating and sleeping on lava fields, when he would have been much more comfortable back at home in London? Why did I bother to sit in a plane for eight hours, just to sit in another classroom and hear English professors teach on the same books we already have in good old Henry Buhl? “Is it lack of imagination that makes us come \/ to imagined places, not just stay at home?” asks Bishop near the end of the poem. Are we just too bored to stay quietly in one place? Or does travelling have a deeper inherent value? Neither Morris nor Bishop directly answer that question, but through my own experiences, I am beginning to formulate an insight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I didn’t leave Grove City for a semester because I found home too dull and thought that visiting new grocery stores and learning to read a railway map was the most entertaining alternative. Instead, I am travelling because I am starting to see my home as being much bigger than I once thought. For every new experience I have confronted in this new country, I am finding half a dozen commonalities between the ways we and the Brits live our everyday lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Humanity has a lot more similarities holding it together than differences pulling it apart. The little life I am carving out in Oxford for the next three months will be a challenge, and I am already learning new practical skills and recognizing aspects of myself that I had not noticed before. But at the bottom of it all, God is at work in all corners of the earth, and the same sun is still shining on me here as in Pennsylvania (at least, when it’s not raining \u2013 typical England!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Spending Homecoming weekend at Oxford<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":2109,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[211],"tags":[99,34],"class_list":["post-1064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-people","tag-anastasia-brown","tag-issue-2025-10-10"],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2026\/09\/2025-10-10-26-homegoing-1-v2.jpg",522,857,false],"thumbnail":["\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2026\/09\/2025-10-10-26-homegoing-1-v2.jpg",91,150,false],"medium":["\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2026\/09\/2025-10-10-26-homegoing-1-v2.jpg",183,300,false],"medium_large":["\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2026\/09\/2025-10-10-26-homegoing-1-v2.jpg",522,857,false],"large":["\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2026\/09\/2025-10-10-26-homegoing-1-v2.jpg",522,857,false],"1536x1536":["\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2026\/09\/2025-10-10-26-homegoing-1-v2.jpg",522,857,false],"2048x2048":["\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2026\/09\/2025-10-10-26-homegoing-1-v2.jpg",522,857,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"Ian Schartner","author_link":"https:\/\/stuorgs2.gcc.edu\/thecollegian\/author\/schartnerij23\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"Spending Homecoming weekend at Oxford","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuorgs2.gcc.edu\/thecollegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuorgs2.gcc.edu\/thecollegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuorgs2.gcc.edu\/thecollegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuorgs2.gcc.edu\/thecollegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuorgs2.gcc.edu\/thecollegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1064"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/stuorgs2.gcc.edu\/thecollegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2213,"href":"https:\/\/stuorgs2.gcc.edu\/thecollegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064\/revisions\/2213"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuorgs2.gcc.edu\/thecollegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuorgs2.gcc.edu\/thecollegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuorgs2.gcc.edu\/thecollegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuorgs2.gcc.edu\/thecollegian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}