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...

This will be a brief one... Friday was (likely) my last day of fieldwork at my job - I have 5 weeks left now, so things are starting to wrap up (or at least that's what I'm pretending). We are working (with a few other agencies/companies) on an oyster/eelgrass pilot restoration project off the coast of San Rafael (project website, recent article in the SF Gate). ESA (my company) is monitoring the physical processes like changes in topography, waves, and also water quality. On Friday we conducted a site-wide bathymetric survey that we will be comparing with a pre-project survey to see how the oyster beds may be affecting regional sediment processes.

We used a GPS/depth sounder system strapped on our sylishly-camo field kayak to do the survey. I haven't had a chance to calculate exactly how far we kayaked, but we paddled east and west and north and south across the site for about 4 hours. It was exhausting, but we finished just in time to return the equipment to the rental place. It was also just in time to head to San Francisco and meet up with Doug and his friends to watch the Giant's game from outside the stadium.

Let me introduce you to Alice, my wonderful Bay Area kayaking buddy. She wrote this guest post about our quick trip up to Lewiston Lake over Memorial Day weekend. We also paddled on Whiskeytown Lake, which you can read about here. The last time we paddled on freshwater was at Clear Lake in June 2013, so this was quite refreshing!

After dilly dallying waterside at the Berkeley Marina (Nena had just completed a heroic game of kayak water polo and we were watching the more advanced paddlers warm up), Nena and I left the Bay’s sparkling waters for the heat of mid CA. At first it didn't feel like it made sense to leave such pleasant weather behind because the Bay was so glorious, but it was cool to travel through so many climate zones- arid, agricultural, mountains and valleys. My camping book guided us just north of Whiskeytown Lake to Lewiston Lake, where we nabbed the final walk-in site at the end of the loop, hugging the southwestern side of the lake...