The past few days have been very exciting. Yesterday Mom Gelser and I drove to Philadelphia for what I hope was my last interview with Genesis Healthcare and then voyaged through a crazy storm to get back to Vestal all in the same day. Genesis said that I should hear from them in the next few days what their decision is. Prayers are appreciated and more updates on that to follow.
As of 8 PM on Thursday, July 26, 2012 Nate and I are officially both jobless and homeless. We packed up the rest of our belongings, turned in the keys to the apartment, and spent the night at the Gelser parents' house (without power!). It came back on around 9:30 this morning right after the Gelser parents drove to a friend's house to borrow a generator and had it in the trunk of their car. Funny how that seems to happen.
Thanks to everyone for your support in our lives and your interest in our future (and trip!).
Now, two very excited young adults are ready to set out on the journey of a lifetime...
First stop: Cleveland
We enjoyed our morning with Aunt Valerie and Uncle Brad before going to the Botanical Gardens and making good use of our Ross Park Zoo pass. Thanks to Aunt Valerie and Uncle Brad for being a part of our journey! The Botanical Gardens was a beautiful place and a lot of fun to take a quick spin through.I loved the butterfly garden, it was neat to take around the identification sheet and try to figure out which ones were what. Nate and I both agreed that we liked the indoor gardens better than we liked the outdoor gardens. We also really like the "Spiny Dessert" there. It had all kinds of cacti, a big tree, and some tortoises. At the cafe we had a tasty lunch of a buffalo chicken wrap and a bowl of mulligatawny (a curry soup with chicken and veggies). We also made a stop at the Cleveland Art Museum. It was free to go in and look at the galleries. I got in trouble for standing too close to Claude Monet's painting "Water Lilies."
We got an Annual National Park Pass at the Cuyahoga Valley National Park and also got a "passport" to stamp all of the parks that we went to. We also decided to collect sew-able patches at each park and hope to do something creative with them at the end of the trip. We picked up a college friend, Ian, in Illinois. We had a hard time with the time change. Garmin was smarter than we thought and calculated our eta in the correct time zone (took us a while to figure that out). We ate together at a Steak n' Shake. This was my first time at a Steak n' Shake and Nate and I split a delicious cookie dough milkshake. They also make a great burger. It was great to see Ian and catch up! He brought us to his apartment for a pit stop to update the blog before he shows us around Wheaton College, the college he is attending. After that, here's to a long night of driving. Driving through the night to make it to South Dakota. Next stop Badlands.
