It has been my dream since I was last there when I was fifteen years old. For my 35th birthday this year, my parents are buying me a round-trip flight to Denmark.  I asked my dad if he would join me.  He said “Yes!”

This particular dream was one I put onto my 2012 treasure map, and I have visualized it happening pretty consistently since then.  Now that dream is about to become a reality.  I am going to Denmark!

My father was born and raised in Denmark and my mother was born and raised in Finland.  They met when my mom was 19 at a club in Helsinki and fell in love.  It would be a few years of writing love letters and having a long-distance relationship that they would become married and travel the world together, wherever my dad’s work would take him.

I was born in Maryland, where we lived for a short while.  After Maryland, we moved to Wisconsin and my sister was born. Then we picked up and moved across the world to a small town near Copenhagen, Denmark.

I spent about five years of my childhood in Denmark and attended school through second grade.  It was a formative time for me, and Danish was my native tongue.  It was the first culture that was my own and a culture I still identify with. Although I have lived in the United States since I was nine years old, I haven’t lost my Danish roots.

A few years ago I took a similar trip with my mom, who took Alan, Mia and me to Finland.  I have never lived in Finland and I do not speak Finnish, but it is a part of my blood, too.  I met family I never knew I had.  I saw the house where my mother and her four siblings grew up.  I saw my grandfather one last time before he passed away. It was an amazing trip.

I will be away from my family for eleven days.  I will miss them and they will miss me.  So much. I am a little fearful of being so far away and of not being able to touch them and see them for so long; this is something I have never done before.  But it is something I have to do and will never regret.  I will come home from my trip and they will forget that I was ever gone, but the memories will live in my mind forever.

I can’t wait.