Staying within the country.

I've been debating about whether I wanted to write about my travels in the United States in this blog, or if I wanted to reserve this blog for travels around the world pertaining to my work for a long time. I've decided that since this journal isn't about all my work in public health, and the USA is huge and so diverse, I might as well write about my inter-state travels as well. Also, since I'm not able to really travel and work on projects for the two years, I might as well write about some sort of traveling that happens between semesters and summer school.


So... it's been a while since my last post here. Basically, I haven't left the country since India. Since then, I've done Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon. In January, I took a backpack with Mike and bused and trained our way all the way up the West Coast, starting from Berkeley, CA, and ending up in Seattle, WA. Exciting things happened, such as leaving my purse on a bus in Florence, OR, without any way to directly contact the bus-driver, hiking to the dunes, visiting Pike's Place, Mike getting food poisoning, and all that good stuff.

I'm looking at other people's pictures and reading their blogs about working/volunteering elsewhere, and I'm ridiculously jealous. I know that I need to do this just so I can finally graduate and continue this later... but I miss India, and most of all, Kenya. Not only do I miss the culture and the people, I miss working there. Having such a break is odd, but it's also been nice. It's allowed me to do things that I haven't really been able to do in the past few years: rockclimbing, hiking, backpacking, reading, relaxing. I'm also trying to figure out this whole graduation thing (which would be nice), and sorting things out with regards to my family.

I'll be taking a backpacking trip in Yosemite in July, and in August, I will be going to Alaska with my family and Mike.