Avery Reeves of Mount Forest celebrated her 17th birthday earlier this month while on a Lions Youth Exchange Program trip to Switzerland.
She was in the small village of Courchapoix with a family that included Megane Brulhart, who also turned 17 this month. The two teenagers celebrated by eating cheese fondue with Megane’s two 12-year-old brothers and parents, Frank Mauer and Marceline Bolduc.
Reeves says the family did eat a lot of cheese and bread during her two-week visit – and that suited her just fine. It was usually 8:30pm before the family sat down to dinner, quite normal in the summer in Switzerland, but much later than she is used to.
Reeves heard about the Lions Exchange Program last fall and decided to apply, even though she had never been on an airplane and her travelling experience was limited to family trips to Eastern Canada and down the coast to Boston.
Switzerland was her first choice as a destination on the exchange program, mainly because the two-week camp, after the two-week home visit, appealed to her.
“I liked the camp (in Lausanne) because I was with other people my age,” she says. “But I really liked the family too. They were awesome.”
The family took numerous day trips. Among Reeves’ favourites was one to Creux du Van, a natural, rocky amphitheatre-shaped attraction approximately 1,400 metres wide and 150m deep in Neuchatel. She also enjoyed the Trift Bridge, a pedestrian suspension bridge 100m high and 170m long above the region of the Trift Glacier in the Alps.
“It was between two mountains,” Reeves says. “We went up a cable car and then hiked two hours to get to the bridge. It was cool and not that wobbly.”
The family also took her to the Jurassic Park Caves, a theme park with dinosaurs and actual caves to explore, as well as to New Chatel Lake, where they walked around the shore, and to Gornergrat, a lookout at 3,089m with a mountain panorama and view of the Matterhorn. Reeves built an inuksuk there.
Because the host family knew Reeves plays hockey, they took her to a tournament where ball hockey was being played on rollerblades with full equipment.
“I had never seen that before,” Reeves says.
She met Lions Exchange Program participants from around the world at the Lions Camp in Lausanne, as well as Lions Club members from across Europe. Each day a different club was responsible for taking the teenagers on an outing.
“My roommates were from Brazil and Hong Kong. It was awesome,” Reeves says. “There were people there from everywhere – Bulgaria, Georgia, Finland, Sweden, Malaysia – and two other girls from Canada.”
No one knows where Mount Forest is so I just said I was a couple of hours north of Toronto,” she says. “The girl from London wanted to know where and it ended up that she has relatives here … The first person I introduced myself to at camp has cousins in Mount Forest.”
Reeves is already making plans to hopefully travel to Brazil next summer to visit her roommate.
The daily trips from the camp included visits to “lots of museums,” including a hot air balloon museum and a Red Cross museum.
A scavenger hunt included things like archery and ziplining. There was a day at a beach and a trip to Geneva to visit the United Nations building and see the famous water fountain Jet d’Eau.
“Did you know there are more Lions Clubs in more countries in the world than countries that belong to the United Nations?” Reeves asked.
“I thought that was kind of cool.”
Reeves said appreciates that the Mount Forest Lions Club sponsored her trip to Switzerland this summer and intends to attend a meeting to tell the club all about it.
