At long last, you get to hear from me. A lot has happened since August when we started this adventure and there are so many things that I could write about. Before we started on the road, I thought that I would have all this free time, without house and grad-school responsibilities. I had a lot of ideas about things I would do in my infinite free time. As it turns out between work (which I have been enjoying and has been going great) and exploring the cities and places where we are staying, I haven’t had a lot of time to pursue all the ideas that I had.
There are still many goals that I wanted to achieve on this adventure. One of these goals was to visit many of our friends and family along the way. This is what I am going to concentrate on for this blog post.
For many years, I have been telling friends and family that I would come and visit someday. Someday turns out to be a perpetual sliding window of time and is always put out into the future. Similar to the t-shirts that say “Free Beer…. Tomorrow”. For this adventure we set out to make good on these promises.
Prior to the trip we were able to see most of the family on my mom’s side when we attended my cousin’s wedding (and the first aunt/uncle on my dad’s side); and, of course, we saw a ton of friends and family that are in and around the twin cities area, and we continued this across many states. I was able to celebrate my birthday in Asheville, NC with one of my good college buddies and his wife, have a trip to Las Vegas with 5 of good friends, visit/stay with all my aunt uncles on my dad’s side including almost all my cousins and their kids current (and one future), meet some coworkers from across the US, and see many of our friends that have moved to places in other states.. I may have done more hanging out with people the past seven months than I had done over the course of 3 years.
I know I am lucky to have this opportunity. First, it has been incredible to be able to catch up and hang out with everyone for an extended time . Secondly, –I don’t even know how this was possible– somehow everyone’s schedule just kind of worked out. And finally, just being able to go on this road trip, explore, and be able to have a job that helps make this all possible.