Leaving on a Jetplane!

Hello everybody!

I know it's been a little while since I've written, but today - the
day I leave for the Big Trip - seems as good as any. I got back from Costa Rica nearly two weeks ago and immediately started neglecting my responsibilities and necessary planning for this trip. Becky flew to Florida and we spent five wonderful days together here, including a trip to Naples to watch the superbowl with my grandparents (go steelers!!). After she left I only had one and a half days before leaving again, this time for North Carolina to compete in the Wake Forest marketing summit with Akiva and Avi. We didn't exactly take the competition too seriously, but we had a very nice time, especially once the presentation was over! I landed back in Florida late Sunday night, just over two full days before the next leg of my trip, when my lack of preparation and the enormity of still-unfulfilledl tasks truly hit me. In the past two days, with the help of my wonderful parents, I've:

• Bought a backpack
• Realized that I booked an overly ambitious trip, trying to cover
enormous distances in impossibly short times, and therefore booked a
series of connecting flights to help me along the way
• Tried packing only to discover my pack was too small
• Bought a new backpack
• Spent endless hours trying to form some sort of itinerary

I could not have done this without my parents, not even close. These are all things that any responsible person would have had taken care of well ahead of time. Thank you guys so much!

So here I am, sitting in Miami airport awaiting my flight to Quito. Overall, I'm extremely excited for the trip, but I also feel that this is at once both sad and uplifting. After saying goodbye to my mom and Marni at the airport, which was more emotional for me than I expected, I took a few minutes to collect myself and then headed through security. In many ways this feels like the same strange combination of emotions I've been having trouble dealing with (or, at least understanding) for the past several months. There's an interesting balance between trying to have these incredibly unique experiences and not wanting to leave the people and places that you love and with whom you feel comfortable. I'll try to avoid rambling but this is a time in my life without much stability - which, on the one hand is incredibly rare and valuable and, on the other, totally scary - and never has the difficulty of this balance been more obvious to me. I don't really know what I'm talking about, to be honest, but I just wanted to say that, though I'm far away traveling the world, y'all are not far from my mind..

Please, everyone, be in email touch. I can't wait to hear from you and see you all when I get back!

UPDATE: in the interest of journalistic integrity, I think it's important to note that there was no Internet in the Miami airport so I posted this as soon as I was able to connect in Ecuador.