Hello! I don't really ow what I'm doing with this blog, so please don't expect much. It's mostly just so i don't have to write thirteen different emails all saying the same things.
What's happened thus far...
Since we got off for break, I flew home and almost immediately hopped in the car with my father and a close friend, Marshall fisher, to drive to park city. My father and I stayed the longest, ten days, and had an amazing time skiing. My housemates, Val luks, joined us for five days, as did Tyson. We had some nice skiing for the first few days, but after Christmas the snow was a little smoked down and the powder all but disappeared. After nine days of skiing, Tyson, my father, betsy, and I stuffed ourselves back into the car and drove to Denver. We dropped Betsy off at her boyfriend's brother's house so she could do another four days skiing with them, then drove straight through fourteen hours back to Des Moines.
We returned to Des Moines a few days before new years, toured the great city, then drove to ames and spent new years with liz, Kat, Judy, and other Ames residents at their favorite bar, sargeant peppers. The night was fantastic, other than a semi-serious head bump that Judy handled like a pro, and I couldn't have asked for a better group to ring in the new year with.
After new years, Tyson and I hung around Des Moines for a few days seeing the sites (all four of them), then packed up the car and headed on our road trip. We pretty much did the same thing in each of the cities we visited: walked around looking at all the tourist sites, tyson took pictures of the all buildings and any trains we might have seen, and spent a ridiculous amount of money on food (except for Boston because my housemates were feeling particularly homely while we were there, and I thank you very much for that, it was delicious). The cities we were able to visit were Chicago, Washington, new York, Boston, portsmouth, and Toronto.
The trips through the cities, albeit a bit tiring and bad for my back, were a nice way to see everyone I care about before i head of to the land down under (and under water at this point). So thank you to anyone who reads this that was able to see me on the brief days i was visiting. I really appreciate it, and can't tell you also how much I'm going to miss you.
A special thanks to my sister, cousin Rachel, aunt ann, my tufts family (yes, we are a family you hooligans), and Tyson's family for putting us up for actually significant amounts of time. We wouldn't have been able to afford it without your graciousness. I guess I should thank my parents as well, I don't think they were ready for me to bring home a hungry wolf. Seriously, Tyson eats like no one I've ever met... And I've watched the mens crew team eat breakfast four the past three years.
I guess I should mention that until i figure out how to put up photos with my posts, and probably after that, I'll be using a picasa album to post all my pictures... There'll be a link here at some point along with one on my facebook page. I currently need to shift through them because there's like 1300 pictures and that's just a bit excessive.
On that note, I'm still taking more pictures because Tyson and I are currently on the california zephyr train! We left Denver about an hour and a half ago and we're going through the mountains now. The view is truly spectacular. If you ever have a chance to take some time to get out to the west coast, I would recommend taking the train. It's not all that comfortable but it's doable, and the view during the day all but makes up for the comfort at night. And coffee is only a dollar seventy five so... It's manageable.
The train will take us through salt lake city, Carson city, and finally on to Sacramento where we will try to catch a flight to Los Angeles. Once in la, we'll be staying of the lovely and affordable Travelodge at LAX (which has an outdoor pool i might add), for one night and day, and catching our united flight to Sydney at 10:17 the next night. Lucky for us, united doesn't give you a person tv... So we'll have plenty of time to talk about things that we've somehow missed over the past seven weeks together. Or we'll sleep for the entire fourteen hours.
Once in Sydney we have a bit of an issue. Virgin blue, the airline that is taking us from Sydney to adelaide, only allows a total weight of 23 kilos (fifty pounds) per person. Tyson's luggage probably weighs about 32 kilos and mine about 40. In the event that we have baggage that weighs more than fifty pounds, you pay ten dollars PER KILO over the limit.
WORD TO THE WISE: if flying to Australia with more than one bag, make sure you are flying domestically on an airline that is partners with the international airline you fly... Ten they will check the bags all the way to your destination with out charging you ten dollars per kilo. This would have been nice to know when making my flight arrangements. This mistake will not happen again.
SO, once we get to sydney both tyson and I will be finding a ground shipper that can ship my bag to adelaide for about 30 dollars. Awesome. Hopefully it won't get there too much later than us, considering the bag will either have all of my clothes or all of my shoes. Decisions, decisions.
That's about all I have to say for now. I probably wont be making such long blog entries for a while because, let's face it, no one wants to read through this whole thing anyway. Hopefully ive made it easy to skim.
A toute a l'heure!
Katherine
