Susan Rauch had never flown on an airplane, let alone been away from home without family.

In 1976, Susan Rauch was a self-described country girl whose view of the wider world came through two channels on a black-and-white television. She'd never flown on an airplane, let alone been away from home without family.

Then Clay Electric helped send her to Washington, D.C., on a trip that coincided with the nation's bicentennial year.

Now, 50 years later, as America marks 250 years, Rauch remembers Youth Tour as her first real look at the wider world, the experience that changed the course of her life and the trip that introduced her to the friend of a lifetime.

Rauch, then a junior at Santa Fe High School, entered the Youth Tour contest almost on a whim. When finalists received the questions they'd be asked, she memorized every answer.

Darla Christopher, a student from Bradford County High School, did not.

"Every question I got, I just verbatim answered it," Rauch said. "And Darla, every question she got, she just answered extemporaneously, as she was able to do, because she was so brilliant."

Both girls won.

In Washington, Rauch remembers the monuments and the meetings, including lunch with then-U.S. Sen. Lawton Chiles. But one of the details that still stands out was something much simpler: the hotel room. She'd never stayed in one before.

She also remembers how Youth Tour made her feel.

"We were just like important people," Rauch said. "We were VIPs."

For Rauch and Christopher, the trip became more than a visit to the nation's capital. It was the beginning of a friendship built between two ambitious North Florida teenagers who quickly discovered they shared a dream that sounded, at the time, almost ridiculous.

They wanted to go to Harvard.

"That was just preposterous," Rauch said.

Then it became real.

Rauch sent off her application and tried not to think much more about it. When the acceptance came, one of the first people she called was Christopher.

Christopher had been accepted, too.

The two young women from North Florida went to Harvard, roomed together and helped each other adjust to a world much different from the one they'd known.

"We both understood each other," Rauch said. "It was us against them."

They fit in, Rauch said, and they did well. But they also understood what it meant to arrive there from small North Florida communities, young, ambitious and still sheltered from much of the world.

After college, their lives took different paths. Christopher became a lawyer in Florida. Rauch moved west, spent time in England on a Rotary fellowship, became a police officer in Los Angeles, married and raised a family.

Still, the friendship lasted.

"I spent the first 30 years of my life trying to get as far away from North Florida," Rauch said, "and then the last 30 years trying to get back."

When Rauch and her husband returned to Florida after his retirement, Christopher was ill. Rauch was able to spend those final months with the friend she'd met decades earlier because of Youth Tour.

Christopher died May 29, 2023, after a short illness.

Rauch still sees the trip as one of the turning points of her life.

"I just think it altered my whole trajectory," she said.

Without Youth Tour, Rauch said, she doesn't know whether she would've had the same path to Harvard, or whether she and Christopher would've built the friendship that helped carry them through it.

Years later, she still thinks about what that one trip gave her.

"It gave me the opportunity to travel, meet new people and learn about our country," Rauch said. "But most importantly, it gave me Darla."

For today's Youth Tour students, Rauch said the message is simple: be grateful for the opportunity, and don't assume you know where it will lead.

"You just don't know what's going to come out of it," she said. "It's priceless. It's fun. It's something, hopefully, when they're 66, they'll look back on and be amazed that it happened to them."