Dr. Mark Langenfeld is no stranger to travel.

A Southeast Missouri State University exercise science professor who hails from Columbus, Ohio, Langenfeld has been a traveler from an early age all thanks to his family.

"When I grew up, my family did driving trips and never went outside of North America," Langenfeld said. "I've been to Canada a few times before Canada and the U.S. needed passports and crossed the border to Mexico on a couple family trips. But I didn't go overseas until I was 24 years old, and I really enjoyed it. So I've tried to make opportunities to go many times since."

Langenfeld said his family went on a trip from Columbus to the west coast when he was 10 years old and that trips like these had a significant impact on his attitude toward travel.

"I describe having an insatiable wanderlust, and I think it was largely influenced by early experiences," Langenfeld said. "Seeing the places in the United States that we went to, and we pretty much did a family trip every year different places. "

Throughout his life, Langenfeld has visited 21 countries, not including the United States. He has ventured to Australia, the Bahamas, France, Switzerland, Taiwan and Vietnam just to name a few.

"I have great memories from many of those trips, and there's no one that's simply a stand out because of just the range of experiences and unknown things that happened. Some are good, some are bad, but a lot of memories," Langenfeld said.

Along with family travels, Langenfeld decided to share his love of travel with Southeast students in recent years to try to enrich their overall college experience. His hope is to instill in them a life-long desire to explore and to learn more about different cultures.

Family travel

In 1983, Langenfeld and his wife went on a trip for seven weeks and met up with her parents for four weeks to travel together throughout Europe.

"That was a special trip. In some ways we felt it was almost magical, the two couples traveling together. We just had a grand time," Langenfeld said.

Langenfeld made another trip in 1999 with his family to France to take in a total solar eclipse. He felt the timing would be ideal, his daughters, twins 7 years old and the oldest 11, would be old enough to be "dependable travelers" and would be able to have lasting memories.

"The girls at age 7 and 11 -- we came back, my wife and I, we were convinced that they're not going to have an attitude in life, 'Oh, when I retire I'm going to do a trip of a lifetime.' And that's what I urge, to my students on this trip I said, 'I hope this isn't the one time in your life you go to France or you go to Europe.' I said, 'I hope that this just whets your appetite, and you see that there's an adventure and there's an excitement, and there can be lots of anxiety.' But you and I are understanding, there's this sense of freedom, and so the girls, they loved the trip," Langenfeld said.

He said he has tried to instill his love and appreciation for travel in the lives of his daughters.

"I decided the first time I went to France, I said, 'This isn't the trip of a lifetime, this is the first one,'" Langenfeld said.

In 2012, Langenfeld went on a trip with his wife and his oldest daughter and her family to Europe. He said this trip was an interesting one, because his daughter's 13-month-old son was along for the ride. He had never traveled with a child that young before, but felt the trip was meaningful because it was passing the early experience of travel on to a third generation in his family.

Out of the 17 times Langenfeld has been to Europe, 15 of those trips have included time spent in France. Langenfeld has a colorful history of travel in France, including everything from bicycling from Paris to the Atlantic coast to taking driving trips through the southern part of France to traveling through the Alps.

"I've spent more time in France, prompted by the fact that my grandparents emigrated from there," Langenfeld. "In 1979, my first trip over there, I visited the two villages my grandparents were from. And there had been no communication, my grandparents had died, and after my grandmother died there was no more correspondence. I actually had a sketch of the family tree, and I went to the villages and I found headstones, and I made some inquiries, and that's when I reconnected. Out of my whole lifetime I reconnected the New World family with the Old World family, and it's been really enriching. ... It's been really, really special."

UI343 Transcultural Experience

Langenfeld began organizing and chaperoning trips to Europe as a class (UI343 Transcultural Experience) through Southeast in 2008 after being prompted by the dean of the College of Health and Human Services at the time, Dr. Loretta Prater. Since, he has gone on a trip each year with 14 different students. His most recent class trip was Dec. 27 through Jan. 11.

He said the class is an upper level university studies course and that he feels its coursework should be adequately challenging. The focus of the course is to give students experiences they would not have been able to have simply by being in the United States.

"For me it's been really special. The majority of students have never been out of the U.S. before, and every trip there's some who have been," Langenfeld said. "If they have, it's almost certainly been either with school or with family. So the people that go on the trip, most of them are 21 or older, everyone's 18 or older, so they're ostensibly adults. So for many of them it's a first trip, and if they've been to Europe, they haven't been to Europe in an independent sort of way."

The class Langenfeld teaches is based in Strasbourg, France, for the majority of the trip. Along with Strasbourg, the group makes a side trip to Freiburg, Germany, a day trip to Basel, Switzerland, and a three-day stop in Paris. Langenfeld has been to Strasbourg for more than 80 days on various trips with family and with students.

"[Strasbourg is] a really good city to get a sense of Europe," Langenfeld said. "The name itself means 'crossroads.' That's what Strasbourg means, and it's on the Rhine River, which is a primary river. I mean, it's as important to Europe as the Mississippi is to the United States for commerce and a lot of movement of civilizations, and it's a barrier until you have bridges across it, and all those sorts of things. ... There's a lot of Europe, modern day Europe, a lot of things that are happening with the European Union."

Langenfeld said he enjoys taking classes to Strasbourg because it helps students feel comfortable even though they are thousands of miles away from home.

"The first time I took a group, I wasn't sure how much people would like Strasbourg, but repeatedly people say, 'Strasbourg feels like home, and I really want to go back to Strasbourg sometime.' That's rewarding to me, because it becomes familiar," Langenfeld said.

During the trip to Strasbourg, there are several scheduled group trips, including a boat tour on the Rhine River, castle tours and snow shoeing in the mountains. Other times the students are allowed to venture out on their own. On the side trip to Basel, the group makes a stop at Novartis Pharmaceutical Company to see where pharmaceuticals are produced, learn about emergency procedures in case of chemical spills and tour the company's various buildings because each was designed by a different architect.

"It's especially rewarding to me to see people experience these new things and be able to act on their own without close supervision at every minute," Langenfeld said.

Along with the fun of the trip comes a large amount of responsibility, and Langenfeld said he relies heavily on student feedback each year to fine-tune his class and the itinerary for the trip.

"I'm truly on duty 24/7," Langenfeld said. "When everything works just right it's pretty easy, but we've had travel challenges, and I've had cancelled flights, and there's things to deal with. It's not a vacation."

Langenfeld said he incorporates international elements into his other classes, such as a health care comparison in his HL120 Health Perspectives class, between the United States and other countries like Canada and France.

"In the other classes I teach also, I find I incorporate images that I've taken from these different places. I think it's really enriched what I can relate to students about these other places," Langenfeld said.

Langenfeld said the sense of adventure and exploration keeps travel special and interesting for him.

"I find there's a rhythm to a journey. That's how I feel about it when I'm away," Langenfeld said. "And even with the classes, I have a good idea what the primary itinerary is, but I don't know who I'm going to meet, I don't know what rich experiences there will be, and I have to admit I feel like I thrive on some unknowns. I can plan some things, but I love that, I love being away from the everyday routine. And it becomes somewhat routine, but it's not quite so predictable, and I like that. There's an adventure to it."

Charlie Hebdo attack

On the first day in Paris of Langenfeld's most recent class trip to Europe, terrorists attacked the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. The group was on the train at the time of the attack, but was alerted about it by worried family members.

"It's a fascinating thing to be hearing news reports," Langenfeld said. "Among them, several people said, 'I just got a text from my parents that Paris is on lockdown.' Now I don't know what lockdown means to people, and I don't know just which media outlets were saying Paris was on lockdown. But my reasoning, and various of the students who chose to venture away from the hotel, [was that] Paris is on heightened security. There's already more security than what we're used to in the U.S. ... I felt like, 'We are likely safer here, now, than before the attack because there's so much more security, especially because I don't sense there's any multiple targets that are likely to happen.'"

Langenfeld said all of the students chose to continue with the scheduled itinerary the next day, and although the event had a large impact on the city, they were able to continue their trip without any issue.

"My whole outlook is you really don't know where one of these things will happen, but the chance that I or my group to be in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time, it's a very low likelihood," Langenfeld said. "It's undeniable there is a possibility, but Paris went about its business."

Souvenirs and future plans

Langenfeld mentioned that he is especially selective when it comes to souvenirs. He set a precedent with his family not to expect souvenirs when he comes back from trips but to know that they are always a possibility if he finds something that's just right. He claimed the ideal souvenir is "small, light, cheap and unbreakable."

One stand-out souvenir is Kinder Surprise eggs -- small, hollow chocolate eggs that hold a toy surprise inside. The eggs are banned in the United States because the toys within are a potential choking hazard. Langenfeld's daughters nonetheless were fans of the eggs when they were younger, so it was always special for them to receive the eggs as a souvenir.

Along with the chocolate eggs, Langenfeld has traveled back with bottles of wine.

"I bring back wine," Langenfeld said. "One of my sets of relatives is still in the winemaking business. And they bottle their own wine, which means that my grandmother's name, the family name, is on the wine that they bottle. So that's especially -- it's really special for us to be drinking family wine essentially with a link back 100 years."

Langenfeld said even though he has been a number of places, he still has a bucket list of places he would like to go at some point in his life.

"I have a great wish to go to Machu Picchu, that's on the list. I want that to be sooner rather than later," Langenfeld said. "I haven't been to England, Ireland or Scotland. ... We're giving some thought to going to Europe this summer because the dollar has become so strong against the euro. So we're talking some about Barcelona, never been to Spain, would like to go to Barcelona. I'd like to see the Mediterranean [Sea], the island of Corsica, which is a French island. ... I want to go to New Zealand. ... There's still places in the U.S. I'd like to go. ... There's not enough time in a lifetime."