Though it is tough to leave our home, it is of course very exciting...
Below is our anticipated road trip from Colorado Springs, CO to Warwick, NY. We will be couch surfing our way to New York to hang out with our family before we leave. We are still searching for accommodations in New Orleans and Destin, FL if anyone knows someone in those places tell them we are cool and we would like to stay with them. We just recently received a list of ten million resources to read in preparation for Peace Corps and will be doing a lot of that on our road trip. Things are becoming very real. The last couple of months has been so much preparing to leave our lives in Colorado Springs without much time to prepare for Ethiopia. Now that we have closed that chapter, it is time to open the next chapter, and begin to prepare for Ethiopia. It was like a light switch from closing one chapter to opening the next. Worrying about how we would get the house cleaned in time, whether or not all of our stuff would fit in our Corolla, making sure we said all of our good byes, tying up all of our loose ends (financial, legal and otherwise), is now all complete and NOW we get to decompress and prepare ourselves to be the best Peace Corps volunteers we can be. We now get to wonder about our lives in Ethiopia and how we can be the most effective. We do know, for sure, that we will be teaching English to high school students and we know that the first ten days of training will be in Addis Ababa and then we will go to Butajera for another two-plus months of training. But after that, it is all a mystery. We will take the next month to relax and mentally prepare ourselves for the next two years. We will be going to a music festival in Houston, drinking beer, hanging out with friends and family, and preparing. Today we got to stop at the Cadillac ranch in Amarillo and do some legal graffiti. Tomorrow we will take off for Austin, then Houston, then New Orleans, then Destin, then Raleigh (to see Amo Yousef), and then to Warwick to hang out with the Hummer clan. The first day on the road was great and we are greatly looking forward to the next four weeks.
Peace and Love,
Jimi and Sylvia