Texas

We have officially arrived in Texas. It's hot here.

We left home in Minnesota on Wednesday a few minutes after five in the morning, the car loaded down with all of my things. After a quick stop at McDonalds, we were on our way south, excited at the trip before us. After skirting around the Bridge Collapse area, we hopped on I-35 south and headed for Iowa, then Missouri.

Once in Missouri we turned and went east, until we reached Columbia, where a friend of mine from Germany is studying as an exchange student for this academic year! We hadn't seen eachother since July of 2006, but when we saw each other again, it felt like no time had passed at all. Immediately we began chit chatting in German, as I led her out to the car to meet my mom and sister (who are accompying me on this trip). Once they were introduced, we did switch and start speaking English, and we chit chatted about culture shock and various other topics throughout a stroll in downtown Colombia and dinner at a Texas Steakhouse. After dinner we stopped by Staples to use up a gift card my mom had recieved from her work for Christmas, and then dropped off my mom and sister back at the hotel. Silvia and I grabbed the car, headed to the mall, and wandered around, talking again in German. I was so happy to be able to see her again and speak German, and she was ecstatic to have someone there she knew (she just arrived in Columbia recently) and to be able to speak German with someone as well. Eventually I dropped her off at her dorm and headed back to our hotel room for a short night's rest, before getting up again at five-thirty AM (sleeping in from yesterday though) for another long drive.

Today we drove back through Missouri to Kansas, then Oklahoma, before finally getting to Dallas. After about 12 hours in the car, we reached our hotel here (where they have wireless internet - woo hoo!), and are relaxing after a hard-days drive. Tomorrow we head off to the zoo, then other sight seeing on Saturday and Sunday. On Monday we head off to my internship at CARE - and I'm super excited!

If anyone is interested, the CARE website has recently been updated (and it looks wonderful!) and you can view it at www.bigcatcare.org. If you click on Programs at the left, you'll find a link to the internships. Eventually I imagine my picture will be up under the fall 2007 internship area towards the bottom, and there are pictures of where I'll be staying, as well as an explanation of what some of my duties will be! CARE does a lot of research with National Geogrpahic, and there is a special called Prehistoric Predators: Wolf, that will be aired on the National Geographic channel on August 25th, at 8 pm (I think). The last 20 minutes contains the research and taping done at CARE, and some of the spring/summer internships are featured.

I'll update again in a few days most likely! I hope everyone is having a great week!