From Bangkok to Baltimore

It's been almost exactly a month since I last posted on this blog. Since flying back to the states from Bangkok, it's been a different sort of journey. I spent ten days in Portland saying my goodbyes, first and foremost to a girl I loved very much, but also Portland and the beautiful Pacific Northwest. It's only now that I am in Baltimore preparing for graduate school at Hopkins that I realize what I've lost, and what strength I will gain from these next two years. But I'll save that for later.

My mom and I drove myself across country, passing through Boise, the Grand Tetons, the midwest, and finally reaching Baltimore. Hiking in the Tetons was a fabulous and clarifying experience for me. It was also a goodbye from the wilderness of the west. We did a 13 mile hike through Cascade Canyon, past beautiful waterfalls, thimbleberry, and jagged 13,000 foot peaks.

I reconnected with friends in the midwest. I started in Columbia, MO., meeting up with John, Nicole and their baby Opal. They're good friends from my second year of AmeriCorps, and their daughter is named after the gorgeous Opal Creek natural area in Oregon. I began to learn the first lessons of the next stage of my life-- how I want to raise a kid, have a home, and the like.

Then it was onward to Iowa City, my hometown, where I felt a brief and intense period of being rooted. Whether I like it or not, I'm a child of the corn and the rolling fields, or rather, the liberal bastion of the state, the Peoples Republic of Iowa.

And then Baltimore, oh Baltimore. I was back in another country again, it seemed.