Zooooooooom

Today is the day! I am so stinking excited!

I hope I have packed and taken care of everything.

Here is a little snapshot of what I have packed.

All of the stuff above fit in the backpack below..with a bit of room to spare!

I will miss you all dearly.  The friends and family in my life right now are top notch and I dont think I would be able to do this trip without all your encouragment, funness, and support.  Everyone is invited to meet up with me somewhere along the way.  If I'm in a part of the world you want to see just holler at me and ill meet you at the airport!!!

My phone service is suspended while I am away. If you want to contact me its gonna have to be through this blog, facebook, skype(RoamingJones0705), or by email. 

Lexington - Like Going Home

I came upon a $200 flight to Louisville from Sat to Wed and a $50 car rental for 5 days.  This was just too good of a deal to pass up.  So I packed my bags, got my wonderful friend Matt to drop me off at the airport and headed to Kentucky for a visit before I head out to Africa next Thursday. 

I cant put into words how much fun and happy was had while seeing all my friends back in the Bluegrass.  It started off with tailgating at the UK football game as soon as I arrived in Lexington with Justine, JJ, Kali, Tim, Joe, and Paul, followed by watching the game at Two Keys and hanging out with friends there for a while.

Sunday was a bit of a lounge day given my very long and exhausting day on Sat. ( I had to get up at 3am to catch my plane).  But I met up with Sydney, Jay, and Megan for a late lunch and drinks at new brew pub in town.  Which also happened to be where a friend works so as a bonus I got to hang out with him as well!   Brittney also met up with us. Megan and I finished up the day with a couple movies.

Monday everyone had to work, so I had a low key day and met up with Adam for lunch.  Then it dawned on me that my friend Seth usually doesnt work on Mondays so we planned to meet up at the Country Boy Brewery for a tour and a taste of some of their very unique beers.  I had a jalapeno smoked beer, tasty and very different.  We then ventured on over to Pazzos, the locally famous pizza joint where lots of friends came to hang out! Of course we had GREAT conversation! :-)

Tuesday, my last day to visit, I again had lunch with Adam, but met up with my old roommate Mallory for some catching up and dinner! Thanks Mal for feeding me dinner! Then we headed to Marikkas were I got to join my old sand volleyball team for a reunion game in the league there.  This was also Liz's (my soon to be world travel buddy) last night in Lex so we had a huge crowd out to hang out, chat, hug, and say goodbye.

I had an awesomely great time time seeing everyone again.  Thank you to JJ, Justine, Kali, Tim, Paul (he came out to almost every hang out event), Andrew, Weslee, Alex, Mallory, Joe, Megan, Liz, Chris, Don, Brittney ( I think she came out everytime any of us got together), Olwen, Wes, Kim, Kelly, Ryan, Adam, Alex, Rafa, Seth, Sydney, Jay and everyone else that I havent listed.  Yall are some of the greatest friends a girl could ask for.  I hope to see you all again very soon! Only thing better would have been if Lori and Lindsey could have joined us! Love you all!

Dominican Republic - Sept 5-13

I spent just over a week in the Dominican Republic with one of my favorite college friends Matt.  We found a groupon deal for an all inclusive resort on the beach in La Romana and jumped on the opportunity to get away!

The resort hotel was right on the beach and our room balcony overlooked the huge pool with a swim up bar!

We spent 5 days at the resort then headed the city of Santo Domingo and did a little exploring.

Old city fort.

Christopher Columbus' home.

We spent the majority of this trip napping/reading/drinking on the beach or at the pool.  The few extra days in the city gave a little eye opener into the culture.  Another quick yet very fun trip. 

The real excitement came when we were trying to leave the country.  The plane we were supposed to be on had mechanical issues and they had to cancel the flight.  The only flight out the next day.  Thankfully American Airlines put us up for the night in an awesome resort/hotel close to the water.  They also provided dinner breakfast and lunch!  And then today I find out that due to the inconvenience AA is going to credit my account with 15,000 airline miles.  Good job AA on making your customers happy!

Needless to say we did finally make it back home!

National Parks Road Trip Part 4 - The Last of It.

After Glacier we headed 8 hrs south to Craters of the Moon National Park in Idaho.   This was another park that had been mentioned to us along the way and since it wasn't too far out of the way we traveled on down.  

This was a small yet very interesting park.  The entirety of the park was solidified lava formations.  You can see from the pictures that its all lava rock.  The hikes around the park showed vastly different formations and explained how this area came to be.  It was a fun lesson in geology! 

This is our campsite in the midst of the lava rocks!

Here is dad whipping up some yummy french toast!

Sunrise!

Lava formations!

So, this next picture is of a lava tube.  As the lava flows the top layers solidify while the flow of lava below continues.  The lava flows until the underground "river" is emptied and leaves behind a cave.  Some are small and some are HUGE, large enough to walk through.  I found this to be extremely fascinating.  The park had several lava tubes that your could crawl and wiggle through and several you could walk through with no problem.

The next journey was to Rocky Mountain Park. This was a very loooooong drive and we had to stop one night in Wyoming.  We finished up the drive the next day and almost as soon as we entered the park we saw a huge moose. 

We kinda made a bum day of this day because we had been traveling for two weeks and were exhausted so we set up a camp for the night. 

However, the next day we woke up early ( and freezing) to a herd of elk bugling and walking causally through our camp. 

We made it through the park and went on a few small hikes. 

This picture of a pine marten is my most FAVORITE photo of the entire trip.  He was very curious about us and kept peeking out to see what we were doing.  I snapped this picture at just the right time. 

There was a ton of wildlife at the park. This is a Pika....which looks a lot like a mouse without a tail.

Mountains, mountains, mountains!

Our final stop was in Manitou Springs and Pikes Peak.  We took the cog rail to the top of the peak to look out over all of Colorado!

Whooooa! What a great trip! This was an excellent start to my adventures for this coming year. It was also good to spend some quality time with my Dad. America is amazing.  Get out and see it!

National Parks Road Trip - Part 3 - Big Horn Canyon, Cody and Glacier National

Following Yellowstone, we traveled East to Big Horn Canyon National Recreational Area.  The camping here was also free.  The canyon was beautiful. 

Did you know there are still WILD horses running around in the US? Neither did I.  We had to pass through a wild horse range in order to get to our campsite.  This herd was hanging out right by the road. 

We went on a couple of short hikes around the canyon area.  Pictures just dont do the real thing justice.

Stumbled upon some Big Horn Sheep on one hike. 

We also visited Cody, WY which is a fun little tourist town about an hours drive from Big Horn Canyon.  Here we also went "rafting".  I would actually consider it floating down the river in a raft.  There was almost no waves what so ever, but it was nice to see all the scenery in the area.

Every night Cody, WY has a free gun show in the street. They set it up to be comincal.  There was a character in the skit with the name Dick Cheney and in the story line he "accidentally" shot his hunting buddy.  

We heard from several people that Glacier National was an amazing scenic park to visit.  Everyone insisted we visit since we were already so close (only 16hrs off from our planned route).  Soooooo, what the heck, we jumped in the car and headed north!

And everyone was right.  The views were indeed amazing. Mountains were everywhere.  Not to mention, some how, the weather was warmer than at Yellowstone. 

Again we hiked around on some of the shorter day trails.  Water falls allllll over the place. 

And we saw a real glacier!

We were so high up in the picture that we had to look down onto the waterfall. 

One part of the park had HUGE cedar and cotton wood trees.  Im not sure how some of them ended up hollowed out like this one but it made for a cute picture.  The tree, even though part of its trunk was hollowed out, was still alive!

We hiked a 4 mile round trip trail to Avalanche Lake.  This has got to be one of the most spectacular hikes I have ever done.  The entire trail runs along side a stream that has cut perfect cylindrical shapes out of the rocks.  There were beautiful huge trees along the entire trail and once you arrived at the lake the view was breathtaking.  The mountains surrounded the lake and at the time we counted 5 different waterfalls flowing down the mountains and into the crystal clear lake.  This was definitely one of the highlights of the entire trip. 

Also, also, also......the trip up to Glacier enabled us to see a grizzly bear! He/She was chowing down on some berries on the side of the road.  You can believe I didn't get too far away from the truck to snap a few pictures and watch the beautiful animal.

Glacier was indeed a fascinating place.