Leaving on a Jet Plane

After several weeks of amazing bonding time with friends and family, including a hike with my dad, an incredible (if cold and rainy) weekend of camping with a group of my favorite people, and a whole lot of trying to cram an entire Michigan summer into a month, it is finally time.

Today is the day!  I will be leaving home and all of my friends and my beloved Traverse City and flying out to Portland this afternoon! It's a little less surreal than I'm sure it must be to move to another country and another culture, but I'm still trying to digest the fact that I will only be home a few times in the next year and that the majority of the year will be spent far away from everything I know.  I'm going to really miss being home and within a few hours of most of my best friends! 

Once I get out there, the job search begins in earnest.  I have been scoping out places that might be intriguing and fulfilling and useful to work for about a month now, but haven't quite found anything that clicked.  However, I'm guessing that job searching is a little easier once you are actually living in the town in which you plan to work.  My hope is still to find something that might be a legitimate "real-life" job, but I have resigned myself to the fact that even if I am unable to encounter something like that, there are quite a few volunteer jobs at museums that I would be able to work at to at least gain experience, and I can earn my keep being a barrista or something on the side.  Whatever happens, I am convinced that God has something amazing planned for this next year!!!

I'll miss all of you in Michigan, and I'm already looking forward to meeting those wonderful friends that are yet to be met!