Travel to Europe - A significant opportunityand the impact it had on you

During last year's spring break I had the opportunity to travel to Europe. For me this was like a dream come true. I had never gone outside of the country in my life or had traveled in an airplane before. My parents had made this dream for me possible. The trip was part of a school fieldtrip, that meant that it involve traveling with the schoolteachers.

The trip cost was about two thousand five hundred dollars including all expenses. I don't come from a family that can just decide to spend money on a child and send them to travel to another country just like that. On the contrary my family right now barely has money to support our family. Fortunately we had to pay the trip in about a year. During that year my family was on a budget. And during that time I had manage to save up about two hundred dollars for the trip. I was also selling candy and chips at school to help pay for my trip and had raised a total about five hundred dollars selling candies and chips. My relatives donated money for me to go on that trip as well. When I saw this, I felt as if I had a family that cared and loved to me so much that they were willing to help me get together enough money to go on this trip.

When I went on that trip I felt as if I was the happiest person in the world. I felt appreciated and fortunate to have a family like the one I had. I experienced so much on that trip I got to go see the Eiffel tower in Paris at night, which was a beautiful experience for me. I also got to look at the leaning tower in Pisa, Italy. In London I got to go look at the clock of London, though I didn't to see Queen Elizabeth, London is a wonderful place to look at. Each place that I went to I saw how different their culture is from ours. I also got to see how fortune I am to live in the United States. Many of those places didn't have clean water to drink out of, or public restrooms. Here in the United States, in almost all the places we go to there is a public restrooms and clean free water that we can drink out of.

Visiting these places made a huge impact in my life. I got to experience so much different incredible things. Starting off with the different cultures that each country had to offer. I got to experience the different manners and the history of each country. Not only that but paying for the trip made a huge impact in my life. It helped me realize, how fortune I am to have the kind of family I am. They have given me the strength to keep on going with school. They have shown me that dreams can come true, with a little help from everyone and you anything is possible. The fact, that I was able to travel around the world, which was something that I thought, I would ever do, gave me hopes that maybe I can go to college and get a degree.

Here is a good example of a place where we can eliminate words so that the sentence will pack a harder punch:

I had never gone outside of the country in my life or had traveled in an airplane before .------------ see how this sentence is jusst as strong without those words?

Woah, let's not end the first par with a boring statement of the obvious:
The trip was part of a school field trip; that meant that it involve traveling with the schoolteachers. ---- and it was a run on sentence, but I fixed it with a semi-colon. But let's not say it was a school field trip and that it involved traveling with teachers. Obviously a field trip involves teachers. Let's end that first para with a sentence about the main theme of the whole essay, the thesis statement.

:-)

I guess the only thing I can say is minimize excessive sentences, only say what need to be said.