We did not get enough sleep last night. Our late return from the Oregon Dunes and Bridget's marionberry smoothie adventure (at midnight) resulted in a very late bedtime. The homeowners' dog (she is house sitting), Maddy, finds it necessary to clippy-clop around the house every 20 minutes, shaking her cowbells in the process (she also looks like a cow). Hence the lack of sleep.

I accompanied Bridget in some morning errands:

• Returning her high visibility PPE shirt and purchasing 4 rolls of duct tape at Wilco (I'm pretty sure the band is not named after this store)
• Coffee break at The Beanery (a very Corvallis thing to do)
• Stopping by her office at OSU to make/print some shipping labels, and meeting some of her (very important) friends in the process
• Stopping by the shipyard (which I was disappointed to find does not have ships nor water) to package up some equipment for her upcoming research cruise to Romania (!). We asked her colleague whether we could borrow his SUP and received a confident "No" for an answer.

Read on...

Today marks the start of a 24-day cross-country road trip from San Francisco to Boston. I'll be heading up the west coast through Corvallis, Portland, Seattle, and the San Juan Islands before taking a turn and heading east through Bozeman, Bismarck, the Great Lakes, Rochester, NYC, and finally Boston. My hope is to post every couple days, which means my writing will be much more stream-of-consciousness. Apologies in advance for the typos and lack of research. I'm excited to share my experiences as they happen!

A quick recap: In March I found out I'd been awarded a Fulbright grant to study flood management in the Netherlands at the Technical University of Delft (TUDelft). I spent a few weeks hemming-and-hawing about whether or not to leave my great job as a coastal engineer in San Francisco and how to relay the news to my company. In April I broke the news, and the outcome was positive! They offered to let me continue working part time remotely during my year away.

Fast forward: much packing and selling and spreadsheeting later (I'll have to post my planning spreadsheet template at some point), I'm sitting in the Bed Bath and Beyond parking lot in Larkspur waiting for Alice to begin the first leg of this next adventure. Tonight we'll be staying at MacKerricher State Park on the coast in Mendocino County. We'll be kayaking on one of the nearby rivers today - location still to be determined.

The past couple weeks have been incredible. While saying goodbye every day is sad, it's been great to spend time with the amazing California friends I've gotten to know over the past 3 years. I'm already looking forward to my return to the west coast :)

Alice and I followed each other up the 101 and west on the 128, stopping at a BBQ joint on the way to buy coffee and a mini bottle of champagne. Nena tailgated lots of people on the windy 128 with Alice close in tow. We stopped at the Paul M. Dimmick...