I figured a good place to start my travel journal would be to discuss the planning process that went into my upcoming trip to SE Asia. Back in October, when I was FINALLY finished with the 6 month application process and was accepted to PA school, I made my decision on which school to go to, submited my deposit, and evaluated how much time I had left to have fun before school started. I made it a mission to fill that time with unlimited adventures and memories and named this the "Year of Emily."Since then, I have traveled home (Muscatine, IA) numerous times, to Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando, Ft. Myers, Sarasota multiple times, Cancun, Las Vegas, Key West, San Diego, Palm Springs, Indo, CA, Minneapolis, Sacramento, San Francisco, Hollywood,Los Angeles, and Laguna Beach. I have attended the Iowa Bowl Game in Tampa, Gasparilla (Tampa Pirate Festival (google it)), a dance competition, a wine festival on the beach, ran my first 15K, attended three weddings, my first craw-fish boil and three music festivals (EDC, Coachella and Big Guava), celebrated many birthdays and a bachelorette party, and attended many concerts (Miley Cyrus, Zac Brown Band, Little Dragon, Phantogram, the list goes on and on).
As alluded to earlier and in the title of my blog, my last big adventure is to travel for 3 weeks in SE Asia, a destination that I mainly picked because of my love of Elephants. I relied heavily on my friend from college, Anne, who now works for Student Travel Association (STA) and hooked me up with some really great deals. After months of going back and forth on whether or not people would be traveling with me, where I would be traveling out of and what I would actually be doing, we nailed down my flights and picked a tour. I couldn't have done it without her help. I am SO excited for the trip to begin!
I know many of you are thinking (especially you; mom and dad and brother), shouldn't you be saving all your money for when you're a broke PA school student? Yes, you're probably right, that is what I should've been doing all this time... but where's the fun in that? What am I going to spend my money on in PA school? I will be studying 24/7... I have enough student loans to get me through and I have budgeted and saved accordingly... you can always make money, you can't always make memories.. so cheers to YOLOing as corney as that sounds!
My goal is to post as much as I can and share as much as I can while I'm there in order to keep an organized journal of my time there, and to keep those of you who are worried about me traveling alone a little more at ease :D
now.. onto packing