May 28, 2006
Eleanor, my youngest sister, graduated from San Francisco State U. this weekend with a masters in psychology. We missed her undergrad graduation since I was in Morocco and David was in Italy, so we couldn't very well miss this one, even if we had a great excuse. Instead, since we'd already decided our next big trip was to Asia, we just arranged to fly out of SFO, which we thought would work perfectly.
We needed to get to San Fran, though, so we thought we'd do a combined "camp in Utah" and "see family" trip across the country. To that end, we flew to Wichita and visited with John and Rosie, old friends of Papa's, and then drove to Denver to see various cousins, which was a lot of fun. We then hiked in Utah (see Geology Happens), which was fabulous before heading to Las Vegas to see David's family and some of my cousins, before leaving for San Fran.
This all sounded like an excellent plan before we actually started on the trip. But then we had to pack. Not only did we have to pack for Asia, we had to pack for the U.S., which included camping and a fancy graduation party, two rather dissimilar events. The resulting packing frenzy was not pretty (pictured above), but David's such an engineer that we had to lay it all out. We made it, though, and now we leave tomorrow for Seoul. We have three months in South Korea and China. We're excited!