It's really here!!! :-)

I arrived home from my 3 week working stint at UC Berkeley on the red eye out of SFO at 6 AM Saturday.  If you are not totally on top of my summer adventures, I work for an organization called Summer Institute for the Gifted that hosts camps for academically gifted 10-17 year olds at prestigious college campuses throughout the US (UC Berkeley, UCLA, UT Austin, Emery, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Vassar, Bryn Mawr and Amherst) as well as numerous day programs throughout the US.  I play the role of camp nurse and earn enough money to finance my adventures for the rest of the summer.  What an awesome deal!

I brought with me a souvenir from California, the 1st cold that I've had since 2008 and is it ever a doozie.  I am totally miserable and spent $70 on every homeopathic remedy and OTC under the sun to try to whip this beast before we leave on Monday morning.  I am still hoping that I will be all recovered by then.  Part of the problem could be that even though I felt awful on Friday, I still did the San Francisco to Tiburon bike ride because I wasn't going to let a little cold get me down, then could not sleep but an hour on the flight back to Michigan.  BUT, The best part though is that a car load of my bff's (Glenda, Laurelle & Nancy) met me at 6 AM at the airport and off we went for breakfast where Kelly also joined us. WHAT A GREAT WELCOME HOME :-)

The trip preparations continue... haircut and color, I will probably be totally unrecognizable after 7 weeks with no color... Please believe me on that one, followed by a massage - ok I did fall asleep for a couple of minutes at the end after all of the painful parts were finished.

Tom and I bought a 22 ft travel trailer for our Alaska adventure, we are novices with big toys but I have to say that I was very impressed with his ability to get it moved into my driveway in short-order!  I thought that I would park myself in a lawn chair and enjoy the festivities with a glass of wine but NO, he was on top of his game...  He is way on top of the learning curve!  So now we are getting the trailer loaded with all of our gear for our adventures; backpacks, daypacks, stocked up with enough food for the next few long days of hard driving.

We plan to drive long and hard until we get to Edmondton then slow our pace down to enjoy the scenery.  We plan to leave at 7:00 AM Monday morning (7/11) and go north through Michigan and across the UP to the Ironwood area then camp for the night.  Tuesday we plan to get somewhere in the Minot, ND area and Wednesday somewhere between Saskatoon and Edmondton.

Alaska or Bust - here we come!!

kate