Transformative travel: Readers' tales of trips that changed their lives

— Ingrid Maria Middleton, Kapaa, Hawaii

A visit to Switzerland melts his heart

While traveling in 1993, I went to Neufchatel, Switzerland, with a friend to visit a family that had hosted foreign exchange students. The house was a nestled in some beautiful rolling hills outside of the city, situated among farmhouses. The family welcomed us with Champagne from the region and showed us where to ditch our backpacks.

Around 6 a.m., the father tapped on my bedroom door to ask if I would help him get the morning milk from the local dairy. We loaded four empty milk pails onto our bikes and pedaled to the city center. There, we dipped the pails into the vat filled with the day's warm milk and headed back to the house. I rode as steady as I could not to spill a drop, the steam rising from the pails.

The next night, I watched as the family prepared the fondue for the night. The smell of garlic, cheese, spices, wine and homemade baked bread filled the air. The eight of us sat around the table and I took my long fondue fork and skewered a piece of fresh rye bread and dipped it into the cheese. I spun the melted cheese around the fork and dipped it into one of the many spices and put it into my mouth. As a non-cheese lover, I was transformed. The blended tastes of nutty Gruyère, Swiss and Emmenthaler made each bite an explosion of flavor that I had been missing out on for years.

A few years and a new bride later brought me back to Switzerland. We ate all the cheese and chocolate fondue Lucerne had to offer and wished that somewhere back in Kansas City where we lived, there was a place that we could continue our passion for fondue. In 2001, three years after our Lucerne trip, we opened a Melting Pot fondue restaurant, where I work to this day.

— Greg Hughes, Overland Park, Kan.

A walk bridges the gap between past and present

I was born and raised in Twinsburg, Ohio, in a segregated neighborhood, although I attended an integrated school. My parents were both from Alabama, and we would visit relatives in Selma during our summer vacation — until 1965, because of the civil rights unrest. I was 12 years old then and always wondered what we would have seen if we had gone.

Fast-forward to 1989. My father and mother had divorced, and he returned to Selma to take care of his elderly aunt, Aunt Abbie, the daughter of a former slave. I came to Selma to help. During my two-month stay, I crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge — the site of the "Bloody Sunday Massacre" — several times a day.

One day, I decided to get out of my car and to walk in the footsteps of those marchers who had been beaten and trampled by horses on their way to Montgomery. As I walked across the bridge, I was "overcome" by some unseen/unheard spirit that brought tears to my eyes. I "heard" voices that seemed to be telling me to do "something" in my life to make a difference.