Traveling Sola

It's currently 5am, and I've been up for two hours already.  I am sitting at a terminal in Pittsburgh Intl Airport, waiting for a plane that will take me to JFK in New York for a long layover before catching another flight to Orlando.  This is my first time traveling alone!

I've long been looking forward to this chance to get out of the Westminster bubble (and I'm not going to lie - escaping the cold has been on my mind since before I booked my ticket).  But truly, I'm traveling more for business than pleasure.  I'm spending tomorrow at the University of Central Florida to meet graduate students and faculty.

My mother and I drove down to Maryland on Sunday and spent the day exploring D.C.  We then spent the night in a hotel and visited the University of Maryland the next day.  These college visits harken back to our time spent together four years ago, when I was deciding where to spend my four years after high school graduation.

This time of exploration and uncertainty is familiar, but also very different.  I spent my undergraduate years an hour from home, but this is a chance for me to get out of Western PA and become more independent.  Another difference is that I'm not totally alone in this either - instead, I'll have my best friend by my side.  In a way, this is a beautiful thing because I don't have to fear facing the unknown by myself.  On the other hand, it is very hard to plan our futures together!  Tony is applying to jobs while I'm applying to graduate schools.  We're still waiting to see where we'll be living, and we're hoping that our fates align, and we end up both following our dreams... in the same place.  There are lots of questions that we can't answer, and decisions that haven't yet been made.  We graduate in about a month and a half, and hopefully by then we'll know more.

Until then, we wait.