Yesterday, I walked two miles through suburbia to catch a bus to Seattle, then another that took me to Portland, and then another that took me right to the Albany train station. From there, I walked half a mile to Swanson Park where I played on the swings and laid in the grass until my old high school friend, Jess, and her boyfriend came and picked me up, driving me fifteen minutes back to Corvallis.

It was a long day, and I had the best sleep I ever had on their couch last night.

You may have noticed I haven’t been posting in the past couple of weeks, and that’s because, quite simply, I haven’t had the time. In preparation for another two months on the road, living out of a backpack, ride-sharing, busing, and couch-surfing, I was trying to get as much of my homework done as possible and wrap up a few projects to boot.

All that’s done with though, and the future has finally arrived, so I don’t have to think about it. I’m living in the moment the way I always do when I travel, and loving the sense of freedom I get from being confined to living out of a backpack. In a few days I’ll head out of Oregon and into California to see my Grandma in Napa, uncle in Santa Rosa, Aunt in Sebastapol, friends in San Jose, high school buddy in San Mateo, miscellaneous friends in San Francisco, and everyone (including my boyfriend) at Stanford. I’m keeping a travelogue again, so with any luck some profound thoughts will strike me and I’ll have lovely things to post about the nature of travel. One way or another, I think I will find more time for this blog and all you lovely people who follow it now that I’m not weighed down by set schedules and the monotony of home.

I read the better part of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey while on buses and in parks yesterday, and the wisdom of it sticks with me:

“It is only a traveler, hurrying by like a person from another planet, who can rightly enjoy the peace and beauty of the great aesthetic feast. The sight of the resting country does his spirit good. There is something better than music in the unusual silence; and it dispose him to amiable thoughts, like the sound of a little river or the warmth of sunlight.”