Wanderlust

My Sister is the free spirit I wish I could be.

As much as some of you dear readers may comment on my hippie tendencies and my non-traditional ideas of fun (darn you, composting is fun!), I don't hold a candle to My Sister.

I am organized. A planner. Focused. Career-oriented, even when I'm not sure what my career is. An overachiever. An over-committer. A list maker. A doer. (But yes, also a dreamer and an idea person.)


She is an adventurer. A risk taker. The sort of person who lives in Alaska doing odd jobs for the summer. Who travels to the Pacific Northwest for culinary training. Who spends a month camping in the snowy wilds of Canada on a glacier. Who packs up and moves all the way to Boston to work in a funky bar and a hardware store and a yoga clothing store and to enroll in a yoga teacher training course. And then who packs up again (although there's minimal packing; she travels and lives light) to head to Washington D.C.

In Washington, My Sister became relatively settled. She purchased a big farmhouse kitchen table and only lived in two different apartments--a record, I think. She worked at a stellar job and motivated her employees and sold black stretchy pants that people swooned over and taught yoga. Her life became much more sane, even though she still wasn't too great at calling her mother or her sister.


But, as is bound to happen with a free spirit, she got an itch, an itch that random trips to tropical locales and weekend adventures couldn't solve. And so she and her honey did what any sane person would do in such a situation.

They quit their jobs, packed only what they could check on the plane, and left D.C. for a cross-country road-trip (in My Parents' old convertible) so they could settle out West.

In California.

Unless they found a cooler place to stop along the way.

I'm not actually certain where they are today. I did get a text message this weekend that said they'd made it to California, which was the most I'd heard in a week or two.


They've been doing all sorts of exciting things in places with questionable cell phone service, like snowshoeing in Wyoming and visiting Cousin B in Colorado (that's his sweet pooch above) and going to Spring Training games in Arizona. But most importantly, they've been going days on end without showers or civilization, camping in the Grand Canyon and Arches and a million places I'm dying to visit, hiking and getting lost and finding their way again.

Fortunately, My Sister has been posting infrequent updates on a new blog she started. That's where the pics you're seeing here came from. I may or may not have stolen them without her permission, because they're lovely photos and I knew you didn't just want to see text.


You should go check out her blog to read about her adventures and live vicariously through them, as I have been doing. And stop by occasionally in the future, should the mood strike. I'm sure she'll update us soon--or at least within the next month.

Just don't blame me for her spelling. She got the free-spiritedness. I got the spelling and grammar skills.