by Mamie Murphy

He was sound asleep on the warm sand of a beach in Galveston, Tex., when Michael Egner opened his tired eyes to see a herd of cattle staring directly at him.

Many animals had gotten loose from their farms due to the strong winds of a recent hurricane, according to Egner.

“[This was the] first time I left the country,” Egner said. “[It was to] go to Mexico, in 1971. We drove from Kansas City to Nuevo Laredo.”

Egner has been traveling the world for 44 years and his travels have been impacting his students’ learning at St. Teresa’s Academy since 1988.

“All the stories and photos I have brings the history alive, especially the ones that you can’t find in textbooks and the ones about people today and what they think is important,” Egner said.

Egner’s travel stories interested his students so much so that students in his 2011 classes convinced him to plan them a trip to England and France.

“There was a group of students that I had in one class who really wanted to go to Europe because they had heard the stories that I told of my previous trips,” Egner said. “On that trip, we had 21 students and myself, my niece, her husband and a student’s mom as chaperones,” Egner said.

According to Egner, the group spent ten days visiting tourist attractions in London, such as Buckingham Palace and Madam Tussaud’s Wax Museum, taking day-trips in England to destinations like Stonehenge and Oxford and rode the Eurostar, the train that goes under the English Channel, to Paris, where they visited tourist sites such as the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower.

“Everyone had a good time'” Egner said. “Such a good time that a lot of students wanted to go back the next summer, but the administration said we could only go once every two years because there’s too many other trips, so I planned a trip for 2013. We went to basically the same places, except this time in London we saw a two-person stage play of The Woman in Black on the West End,” Egner said.

Even when Egner does not travel to Europe with students, he still makes an effort to visit every year and has since 1999.

“In 2000, I enrolled to take courses at Cambridge University, which I did for about a month and I enjoyed that immensely and met a lot of people,” Egner said. “The next two summers after that I was asked to go back to Cambridge to teach. One summer I taught a course about Carolingian history and the next I taught a course on the Bayeux Tapestry.”

But Europe is not the only continent Egner has explored during his years traveling the globe.

“In 1994, I went to Egypt for two weeks,” Egner said. “That was a pretty harrowing experience because it was right after several tourists had been bombed the summer before…but I had wanted to visit Egypt all my life because I loved Egyptian history.”

Egner and his comrades toured all of Cairo, visited the Giza Plateau and the Sphinx, as well as rode a cruise ship down the Nile River to see the ancient temples and tombs that had been built along the river.

“When I was walking down the street by myself in Cairo, a young man walked up to me and he asked me to come home with him to meet his father,” Egner said. “Our guide said that this was a common thing for Egyptians to do because they want to show you hospitality.”

After talking for two hours with the young man’s father, Egner learned that he was a fragrance merchant who grew flowers in the Faiyum Oasis and harvested them to grind the petals into oil to sell to perfume companies around the world.

“[The father] was so proud to tell me that he had just arrived home from Cleveland,” Egner said. “He was a very fascinating man and I learned a lot about the [Egyptian] culture from him.”

“That’s the thing about history,” Egner said. “You can look at the past and see how it affects the present, and I think that’s just amazing.”