The Summer of Roadtrips and Adventures!

And so the adventure begins... For the past 4 years I have not been around for the summer in the same place I've lived during the rest of the year.

The summer of 2006 I was living downtown Minneapolis and working at the Army High Performance Computing Research Center (AHPCRC)...
The summer of 2007 I was working in Hilo, Hawaii at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Mauna Loa Observatory...
The summer of 2008 I was living in Newport News, Virginia working at NASA's Langley Research Center...
And the summer of 2009 I was technically living in Fairbanks, but I was gone most of the summer with 3 weeks in Longyearbyen, Svalbard (between the North Pole and tip of Norway) at the IPY International Polar Field School ... 2 weeks on the north slope of Alaska for a field school... and about a month in the Arctic Ocean above Europe and Russia on a russian icebreaker ship for the NABOS research expedition.

That leaves this summer wide open for ADVENTURES!!  I've decided to make it the summer of roadtrips!  Beginning with the weekend of May 7th to 9th I will be spending the weekend out of the house.  I will be taking photos and making videos of the trips along the way... sharing stories from the journey, talking about the interesting people I met... and documenting what I hope will be one of the best summers yet!  I hope to look back and reflect on this someday when I'm old and grey to say... wow... that was an incredible summer.  It's so easy to sit and home and waste the summer away and I know I've been guilty of that at times but this is a goal I really hope to keep up!

Thus far I've made it 4 weekends in a row and will be blogging about those in the near future.  There has been one snaffoo so far... that's this weekend.  I was asked to dog/house sit for a professor of mine and there is one weekend that falls during the time that she's gone... thus I will be improvising this weekend...

I still won't be at home so that won't break my official goal... and I plan on sleeping in my tent in the backyard on Friday and Saturday night to still be "camping".  I'm hoping to pick up a new fly fishing rod yet this week with a friend I met fishing and try it out this weekend at a local stream north of town.  That way I'll have a couple day trips fishing and still be camping.

I hope those of you that are far away back home in the lower 48 will enjoy this summer's adventures with me :)  Feel free to post comments or suggest other adventures for me to try out!

My message for you guys:  Life's too short... Make the most of every moment you have... cherish close friendships and family... and tell those you care about you love them as often as possible...