Alexis Burgess is the new family consumer science, parenting, and relationships teacher, but she found a new passion during the pandemic that combines her loves of traveling and being outdoors: geocaching.

Geocaching is an outdoor activity in which people use a GPS to hide and seek containers called geocaches at specific locations marked by coordinates all over the world.

It became a pastime of Burgess and her fiancé.

“When the pandemic started, I was looking up things to do that didn’t involve being around people,” she said. “Geocaching came up and I thought it looked like fun.”

Burgess said they have found things such as a Barbie hat and a “cool” marble, but she also talked about the adventure of the activity.

She recalled that one geocache was held inside a fencepost by a magnet, and she had to reach her hand inside to get it out. Another required her to “find two caches before you could find the last one in the series.”

Burgess said she has always liked to explore and be outdoors. She was born in Ohio and then moved to Montana after second grade, and she studied abroad in Italy for a month in college.

She studied the Italian language and culture for a month in Florence, Italy. She got to live in an apartment in the city and attend school to learn the language.

Burgess got to learn about the different foods, and learned how to make authentic Italian pizza. She had a class on how to make homemade pasta and said she learned that fettuccine alfredo is not Italian, but an Americanized form of an Italian dish.

Burgess was able to attend an Italian opera, visit numerous museums, and travel to famous Italian cities such as Rome and Venice. She visited one of the top five fashion schools in the world, called Polimoda, and attended a fashion show at the start of fashion week.

After her experience, she would encourage her students to study abroad. She said that colleges can help students apply for grants to help cover the cost and that many colleges have scholarships for study abroad classes.

Studying abroad has influenced her ways of teaching by helping her have a passion for other cultures and languages. It’s also helped relate content taught in the classroom.