I had to get up at 3:30 AM THIS MORNING! AAAHHH IA M TIRED! *breathes heavily* Anyways I managed to sleep for like an hour and a half on the plane, but planes are impossible to really be comfortable on so that ended. Now I am home with my puppy who went nuts when he saw me.

I start my new job tomorrow, which I am very nervous about, so I am not left with a lot of time to relax.


Overall from this trip, I was reminded one of the reasons the US is a magnificent place. Even if the country is full of strife, corruption, and dissension, we still have one of the most gorgeous and diverse countries in the world and we have landscapes that cannot be found anywhere else in the world. Even if all else fails, we still have that to be proud of and every American, visitor, what have you, deserves the opportunity to see these amazing places!

Another thing I have concluded....well, around 2 years ago I went to Scotland for four weeks. I was blown away, and the country stole my heart. I had never felt as happy as I was in Scotland. Something about the place just felt like I belonged, like I was connected to it.

I have often wondered since then if it was just the amazing mountains I was connected to, as people who are raised in mountains often are. I wondered if I would have the same feeling if I went to the even more spectacular mountains the US has to offer..................I did not. As amazing as these places were, I never even felt a twinge of what I felt in Scotland. When I left Scotland, I wept. I was so heartbroken that I had to leave, it tore me apart. Now, I am just content to be back in my own bed and to stop living out a suitcase! So now, I know for sure that Scotland was special in a very unique way to me, which makes me all the more determined to go back!

There are still so many things I need to see in the US, but this trip was a heck of a start! I got to cross off I think a total of four things off my bucket list (yes I actually have one of  those). One was to see a desert for the first time, another was to see the Rocky Mountains.

This blog is by no means over! I still have those photos I promised you all from my brother! Just who knows how long it will take for him to post them...... -_-

Until next time!

Well this was really my last day in Seattle. Tomorrow morning, an ungodly time in the morning, I am flying home.

Today it rained, and I did not leave the apartment. I watched tv and made food. It was relaxing after being on the go for so long.

This trip has been amazing. I have seen and done so many things, so many things I don't know if I will ever be able to do again. I have to start up real life as soon as I get back, as I start my new job Friday. No more driving all day and seeing amazing things.

I really want to get active again. This trip has shown me how pathetically out of shape I am. I hope I will be able to come back to the places I have hiked and enjoy them a little more because I am not falling to pieces.

I really like Seattle. I am moving to England for a year in the fall, and I need a place to look to live when I return. Maybe it will be here? I can't go back to NY. It is too expensive to live there. I don't know, these are all just thoughts.

I will continue to post on this blog as more photos from my trip become available from my brother...mostly the ones with me in them doing cool things :D

Until next time my lovelies!

 The water was FREEZING! My hand went numb after a few seconds of poking a star fish! They also had this giant class circle with jelly fish swimming around it, and one side was lit with colored lights.

 The jellies were pretty darn cool. A lot of the tanks were lit with UV light so we could see the glowing affects it had on the plants, some of which were spectacular to see.
 Plus there was the awesome fish like this one...
 This little fellow being like, "WWASSSUUUPPPPP"
 And of course, the so ugly they are cute ones...
 I watch this show on Animal Planet called River Monsters, and they had one show about sturgeon, and I find these fish that sometimes live in fresh water to be awesome and terrifying.
 OKAY OKAY, NOW WE ARE TO THE CUTE AND CUDDLY PART OF THE TOUR! LOOK AT THIS PRECIOUS SEAL!

 OTTERS OTTERS OTTERS OTTERS! I LOVE OTTERS! THEY ARE ONE OF MY FAVS!
 LOOK AT THE MAJESTIC OTTER! SO FLUFFY! SO PLAYFUL! AAAHHHHH
 Okay I am done. Seriously though, I love otters. There were river otters as well as the sea otters I just showed you, but they wouldn't sit still long enough for me to take a good picture of them. Honestly, I could have sat there all day watching the otters, but we had to move on.

Next we went to the underground tour where we went...underground. The surface of the city used to be a lot lower. But the idiots who planned the city had no idea what they were doing, so the tide was always washing up twice a day half way through the business district, making the streets clogged with mud and sewage. Luckily (and I can say luckily because no one died), there was a fire that burned the entire district to the ground, which allowed for the city to rebuild, and they rose the surface of the city and put in sea walls to solve the problem of the tides. What was left behind was remnants of the original city. (This is a very simplified version of what happened. If you are curious about more details Wikipedia is a nice option)
 The above picture used to be the inside of store front windows looking out onto the street.
 These were more windows of the same building, and on the far left was the front door.
 This above photo was a butcher shop.
 An ally way in Seattle as we skipped around from underground to underground.
 This is a skylight that the city built into the new sidewalks so light would shine down into the underground passages. Why? Because people still used the underground tunnels to get around for a long time after the new city was builtQ!
 The above picture was the entrance to the underground portion of a bank. There was a teller cage where people could bring their gold to be found, and behind it was the bank vault...which we walked through.
 This is Matt leaving the vault.

So today was fairly uneventful. I spent the morning catching up on some tv shows, and then the afternoon helping Matt move into his new apartment, which is by far the nicest one in the building. It was redone only 3 months ago!

The most exciting thing about the day was the rose made of toilet paper the land lady left in the bathroom after she cleaned it yesterday....
I mean, I thought it was pretty cool. It used up a lot of toilet paper and I imagine it took a while to make, but I appreciated it. I did not have the heart to actually use it, so it is now sitting on a shelf in the bathroom proudly where it will remain until my brother decides to throw it out. (Seriously though, who was the first person to decide to make toilet paper roses?)

So last night I was SO TIRED I feel asleep while Matt was talking with his friends. You guys don't understand, I am an extremely light sleeper. This never happens. Conclusion? I am super duper tired.

Anyways today we went hiking At the Wallace River. I am so out of shape, and so sore, and so tired. But I did it! I hiked yet another mountain!

It was such a relief walking through a forest and hearing running water near by. I cannot live in the desert or in a place without trees. They are fine for visiting, but I need to go back to the woods at some point. I loved walking over the trail of dark soil with tree roots sticking out everywhere and the trees towering over head. The trees were much taller here than they are back home.

Anyways in some of these pictures I was messing around with the art filters on the camera...like below.

 Trees trees trees......TREES
 A carving of a fish in the middle of the woods? Yes please.






 There was a bunch of these signs all over the place. I really got a kick out of them.


So the hike was hard for me. Like I said, I am really out of shape and most of the hike was up a steep incline. I think I strained my achilles tendon in my left ankle, so that hurt too. I am a mess really, but hopefully this will all make me stronger and motivate me to exercise again when I get home.

I really like this area and could see myself settling down here someday. I just wish we had time to go drive out to the Pacific Ocean, but I am sure I will see it in the future...one way or another

WWOOOO!  So yesterday we left Salt Lake City and finally made it to Seattle! We drove through Oregon for like, an hour, which was cool because now I can say I have been there!.

I really like Washington. Once we started to get in the mountains I started to see running water everywhere. Little streams , cricks, and waterfalls all over the place. This made me realize how water starved I had been. I grew up in NY, where there is water EVERYWHERE! And ever since we left Pennsylvania, we have been in places where there are only major rivers. Utah was especially dry, I mean it was a desert. Getting around water again is like had a corset on or something. I felt constricted, and now I can breathe again.

Seattle is gorgeous. There is green everywhere! Trees, bushes, vines growing off the buildings and bridges. The Olympian mountains are off in the distance, and the sound coming in from the Pacific Ocean is huge and gorgeous. I could easily see myself living here one day.

We are staying with Matt's friends until he can move into his apartment on Monday. Today we are going to be hiking a little bit more. I AM GOING TO TAKE MY OWN PICTURES DAMMIT! I promise.. I will :D

UGH! So all my brother's pictures from Salt Lake City were shot in raws.....which means he needs to edit them himself in order for my computer to be able to use them? I don't know, he is a hardcore amateur photographer. These terms mean nothing to me.

I PROMISE, AS SOON AS THESE PICTURES ARE AVAILABLE TO ME I WILL POST THEM!

In the mean time....I will try to explain.

So in Salt Lake City we went to Temple Square, where the Mormon Temple in located and their head quarters. In the square was this gorgeous fountain, and surrounding it was probably the most spectacular flower garden I have ever seen. It was gorgeous. There were so many different types of flowers, all in bloom, and all brightly colored. They were arranged in color palates that matched perfectly, and there were some purple tulips I really loved that were so dark they looked black. There was also a bunch of these little blue'purple flowers that used to grow outside the house I grew up in. I loved those flowers, I used to sniff them and they would wrap around my nose like they were hugging me.  We spent a lot of time there as Matt was happily taking a million pictures of the flowers.

Then we went to the Utah Museum of Natural History, which is only 2 years old. It was pretty cool! They had a lot of awesome dino skeletons and an entire special exhibit on the history of chocolate! There was a room in that exhibit that held only a video of chocolate being poured into a big bowl of chocolate with seductive music playing in the background, I kid you not. They also had this awesome skeleton of a huge ancient alligator (or crocodile, looked more like alligator to me though)

Probably the thing I was most excited about that day though was I finally got lotion with aloe for my sun burns. (sad I know) Most of the burns have turned to tan, except the burn around my hair line which is very difficult to get the lotion to because, well, my hair is there.

Oh the struggle.

Alright, here is the deal. After hiking all day at Arches, I was a wreck. I was dehydrated, I was sun burned, and I was tired. This means I did not take any pictures and left it all to my brother....which means I can't put any of those pictures on here.

*insert sad crying*

Canyonland was an incredible place. I wish I had been feeling better so I could have appreciated it more. I had never seen a true canyon before this experience. The land stretched out for hundreds of miles, and then all of a sudden plummeted into empty space of more rock. The colors of the rock/soil shifted from red, to gray, to bright green and back. It was impossible to actually see the river that created these canyons, it was too far down in the rock.

One of the main things that stood out to be about this desert, both at Canyon Land and Arches, was the colors. The dominating color was red, but green came in second. Sometimes in was light green soil, and others it was deep green plants that spotted the scenery. These trees, or bushes, were the dark green of pine trees, and stood out remarkably against the red soil and rocks. My favorite color though was the bright gray bushes. These bushes had no foliage, perhaps they were not in season, but their bark was such a light, startlingly bright gray, that they were almost white or silver. Those bushes were one of my favorite things about the desert.

I dragged myself after my brother all over the park as he took a million pictures. I wanted to be more engaged, I really did, but I also wanted to crawl under a bush and die. Okay, not really, but I was not feeling great. It was especially fun when sun screen got into my eyes and I spent a half hour forcing myself to cry to clean it out.

We left Canyon Land, and headed out Salt Lake City the same day. We arrived that night and had dinner at a great Mexican place called The Red Iguana with a friend of Matt's from college. I passed out again that night, completely worn out.

We didn't really see much of the city until today...which is going to be saved for another post. I have to see if I can steal any pictures from Matt's camera because some things just need to be seen.

Day six....I survived sleeping on the ground under the stars fairly well. It has not been the first time I had camped like that....but the first time I was less than half a mile from camp and was surrounded by around 40 people. Our campsite was much less crowded. It wasn't too rough though, as you may have noticed, we had wifi (very slow wifi). It was freezing cold the first night, and I had trouble falling asleep. Not to mention my brother snores.

Anyways the next day we got up early and headed off to Arches National Park. It was SPECTACULAR. I have never seen anything like this place, and I doubt there are many, if any, other places in the world like it. I noticed over half the people we encountered on the very busy trail were internationals. I picked up on a lot of Germans, French, and Chinese visitors.







So this hike was not particularly hard....except if you have been almost completely inactive for the last 8 months like I have. My body was not ready for this x.x

Most of the pictures are on my brother's camera...and he shot them in the raw? Whatever that means....so I cannot put them on here, which is sad because all of the pictures of me are on there.

Anyways, during the entire trip I wondered about how, and even if, the native peoples lived here. It is, after all, a desert, but I couldn't help but seeing the strategical value of this land, or even how it was a fantastic place for ceremonial sites to be held.  Sever days later (aka today) I was at the Utah museum of natural history and found out that, back when the climate was different a few thousands of years ago, people did live here, but more recently the place was uninhabited due to its barren nature.

The other thing I kept thinking about was a little less appreciation for nature and history and more in the area of fantasy. I am attempting to write a novel at the moment...a novel that involves dragons. (dragons are better than everything else, there is no argument). Anyway I couldnt help but seeing this place as the home land for the dragons in my story. Everywhere I looked I saw perfect places for a dragon to perch, basking in the sun, or a cave deep in the rock that they could sleep in at night. This land inspired me, and gave me a hundred ideas for my story. Sadly none of them would have to do with the story I am currently writing, and more to do with the one that (might) come after.

So that night we returned exhausted to the campsite. I passed out around 8:30 and did not get up until 9am. I was TIRED. Oh yea, not only was I tired, I was SUNBURNED. It hurts... a lot. It is still driving me nuts. My brother put on just as much sun screen as I did and he did not burn. Bleck. Hopefully it will turn into a tan and now peel. (insert me putting on a crap ton of aloe infused lotion). I also made the mistake of trying to wash my hair with a bar of soap...

IF YOU HAVE LONG HAIR, DON'T DO IT! Worst thing I have ever done to my hair. It was a mess of tangles that were impossible to comb out, and my hair was so dry it felt like straw. A lot of you don't understand, my hair is usually as soft as silk. I bought shampoo and conditioner that night and washed it again, but it still has not recovered. Yee be warned.....

This desert has done horrible things to my skin and hair, but it was all definitely worth it

Yesterday we did something that used to be so difficult and dangerous, many people lost their lives attempting it. We crossed the Rocky Mountains. Seeing them for myself, I couldnt imagine the terror these people must have faced trying to cross them in their wagons, carrying their entire lives with them. I also thought about the people who lived there before the colonials, and how tough they must have been to survive in this gorgeous place.










This last one is from our camp site...WHICH HAS WIFI! I am so happy right now...if not a bit cold!