A nine year old boy in my area recently won a trip to Australia with National Geographic.
"For Benjamin Wilken, it was the chance of a lifetime. He wrote a 300-word essay on how he became a young explorer, attached a photograph he took, put it in the mail and now, months later, he is packing his bags for an all-expense-paid trip down under with National Geographic."
When I was younger I remember my grandparent’s library holding hundreds of copies of National Geographic Magazine. They had a subscription to the magazine for, what had to be, decades. The best part about it was that they shared this subscription with my father, who would take an edition home after my grandfather was done reading it. I would, in turn, read (or at the very least look at the photos) the editions after he was done.
At the time I didn’t really realize how great an opportunity I had, being exposed to such incredible journalism and information from around the world at my finger-tips, long before I ever signed onto the Internet.
Benjamin Wilken, who started playing with a digital camera around the age of 6, went a step further than I ever did. He read the magazines and even entered a contest in it. To be fair, he has a subscription to National Geographic Kids – perhaps the reading is a tad-bit lighter.
His love for photography, the subscription to the magazine, and his attention to the material is now paying dividends. He and his father have an all-expense paid trip to Tazmania. Based on the experience Leo Laporte had (which I loosely linked to in April of this year), I’m sure he’s in for an incredible Australian adventure.