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22 May 2011

First Day of the Big Trip

Day 1.

It's Sunday, the 22nd of May, 2011. In the "news," if you will, yesterday was supposed to be the day of the rapture, judgment day, the end of the world. Personally, it was the end of the world in a sense - the end of a stage of my life in LA. It was also the beginning of my big journey this summer.

Let me rewind and give some background: I'll be starting grad school in London in September. Instead of simply traveling to London directly from LA, I'll be traveling the whole summer. First, I'm driving across the US to Miami, and then driving to New York, then taking a bus to Boston. From there I'll fly to Iceland, where I'll spend a week, and then onward to England, and around Europe for a couple months before finally returning to London. I only have vague ideas of where I'll be and what I'll do, but things have already been falling into place and I feel like I'm making a good start.

The day started early, and I had been up late trying to pack smartly (which was especially difficult, since I didn't know where I'd end up on this trip). After some goodbyes, I drove to West LA to pick up my travelmate Ueli and to say goodbye to my flatmate. And so the journey began: Our first stop, Santa Monica Beach, where I waded into the ocean and filled an empty water bottle with seawater. The idea was to take this water with me and pour it into the Atlantic Ocean.