On February first, fourteen grade 11 students closed one chapter of their lives only to begin a new one. They said goodbye to a place that had been their temporary home for four and half months previous: the town of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. This was a goodbye that symbolized the halfway mark of their time together as the full-year grade 11 students of Class Afloat, something that, for them, was too impossible to fathom. The unique group had met all together for the first time during the first week of September in Nova Scotia, and they learned plenty as they lived away from home, which for some was farther away from their families than others. During the four and a half months, they had grown as a unit that came to mirror the structure of a family. On February first they left Lunenburg to join a completely new community, one that would in time come to feel like a brand new family.

The journey from Lunenburg, Nova Scotia to Salvador, Brazil consisted of car rides, plane journeys and lengthy layovers in foreign airports. A flight from Halifax to Toronto was the first leg of the two day trip, and upon arriving in Toronto the students already came to meet a handful of members that were travelling to join them on the S.V. Concordia. The grade 11 unit, all adorned in their fire engine red Class Afloat t-shirts, expanded from fourteen students to seventeen when they met the three students who were second semester only, but automatically part of the family. Due to the eye-catching hue of red of their t-shirts, a handful of GAP year students instantly spotted the grade 11s and joined them as they waited for five hours in the Pearson International Airport.

A plane ride that lasted over ten hours took these students through countless movies, meaningful chats, some well-deserved naps and even Portuguese lessons with their newfound Brazilian friends in the seats next to them. The plane landed in Sao Paulo, where the students travelled as one unit of excited smiles, claiming their sailor sacks and checking them through to the next leg of their journey. While in Sao Paulo the students experienced quite a lengthy layover, where they sat out under the Brazilian sun, indulged in some Brazilian treats, chatted with Brazilian travellers and traded their American dollars for the Brazilian currency. The next flight took them to their final destination city: Salvador, Brazil. The students hopped onto buses, and after a half hour ride through the urban streets of Salvador, they had arrived at their final destination. A 188 foot tall ship was to be their home for the next five months: S.V. Concordia. As each and every student dragged their hefty bags up the gangway and stepped onto the ship for the very first time, they knew that they had finally made it to all they had been waiting for. As the memories of Lunenburg were tucked safe into the backs of their minds, the Class Afloat grade 11 unit met a ship full of new friendly faces: an explosion of names, smiles and a beautiful sense of welcoming that would hopefully soon become as familiar as family.