There and Back Again

Well, I have been on the road a lot the past two weeks. Traveling to the States is kind of a long trek for me. I mean, it was only a four-hour bus ride to Antigua, an early morning (4 a.m.) 45-minute shuttle to the airport, a three-hour flight to Houston, going through customs, an hour left of my layover, another 3-hour flight to Cleveland, and then an hour in the car home. It was pretty exhausting. And, I managed to pick up bed bugs in my hostel in Antigua--I was even staying at one of the few places left that supposedly didn't have bed bugs--which sucked once I got home and had to store everything, including the pile of souvenirs I had bought for my family, in plastic bags in the garage.

I was only home for about a day and a half before we headed to Columbus for my sister's graduation ceremony. It was a bit unreal because there were 9,700 graduates and everyone (minus the PhD grads) graduated en masse. At least we got to sit in the fancy seats in the stadium. I did get pretty badly sunburned though. Stupid sunscreen I applied multiple times failed.

A few hours after my sister graduated, we were on the road to West Virginia, where we spent the night before heading to the Outer Banks in North Carolina. After a total of 15 hours from Columbus, we met up there with my aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends and had a nice, relaxing family reunion. I ate lots of good food (tuna, fried fish, hush puppies, ice cream, fudge, chips, etc.) and got to wade around in the sound and the ocean.

Then fifteen hours to Columbus, two more hours to home, and three days before heading back to Guatemala. My flight from Houston to Guate was delayed four hours so I didn't make it back to site until yesterday afternoon after a lovely three-hour bus ride sitting across the aisle from a boy throwing up every fifteen minutes or so. After getting back, I had enough time to throw my stuff down in my house before I had to head into the city to meet with another volunteer. Then back to visit with my host family and meet with my partner and finally home. Now I plan to stick around here and relax, hopefully getting rid of this feeling of exhaustion that has settled in over the past two weeks. A vacation like the one I just took is a little too much time in cars and traveling and not enough time sitting around doing nothing. Good thing feria is going on here so I don't have any classes.

Now I've caught everyone up in a fairly boring post.

In the process of...

...killing off bed bugs and itching all of the bedbug bites on my feet, legs, arms and back. So much for wearing a nice dress to my sister's graduation. Will get back to writing a new blog post soon (hopefully).