it is finished.

greetings from the garden state. i've been here a few days - and have been meaning to post, but mostly i've just been decompressing and hanging out with my brother. the end to my 4-week adventure was definitely bittersweet for sure, but it's been nice to not be living out of my car any longer :) here's a bit of a statistics look at my trip:

-5958 miles
-27 days
-19 states (i'm up to 42 out of 50 states visited)
-3 time zone changes (plus hitting daylight savings in utah, but NOT in arizona, then again in new mexico)
-1 cracked windshield (damn big trucks!!!)
-1 lost kayak paddle (i'm an idiot)
-28 tanks of gas
-4 fastfood meals (ONLY 4!!! so proud of myself. 2 mcdonalds, 1 taco bell, 1 wendy's)
-15 old friends visited
-6 new friends made (at LEAST)
-28 cups of coffee (mostly the bad, burnt-cardboard-tasting gas station variety)
-10 showers (1 of which was ICE COLD in the everglades)
-6 nights of sleep in an actual bed
-5 national parks

that's about all the creative stats i could think of...but they're pretty impressive i think. and certainly very defining of my trip.

so now i'm in NJ, spending the next month and a half with my brother. it's already been nice to just sit around, catch up, and watch lots of movies together. so i'll be around here, probably working a temp job, and seeing some friends around the northeast until i head up to the adirondacks for the summer to work with La Vida. so far, i've been catching up on the day-to-day life stuff that i haven't done in the past month. i just had my taxes done this morning at h&r block (yay for swEEEEt refunds coming!), and i'm going to see a temp agency on friday morning. in the meantime, i've been sitting zombie-like in front of my brother's 200+ channel monster tv watching movie after movie, eating good food, going through my 1000s of pictures that i've taken, and attempting to organize my truckload of junk that got shipped here to his house. i'm going to be posting the best-of pics on my facebook account. once i get them set, i'll update this post with links to them (even if you aren't a facebook'er).

i feel like i should have something profound to say as my 'final' post, but it's not really going to be my final post - i'll be continuing the blog on a regular basis. i'm a processor anyways, so putting things down and thinking about them is a good thing for me - even if none of you continue to read them. but if you want, you can continue to check in here for (hopefully) some regular thoughts/questions/ramblings. i'll end with some wise words...

"We may not like the other, but we are called to love. We may certainly not validate or condone his or her actions. But we are called into a radical sense of our interconnectedness as creatures and children of the same God. To perceive this deep level of interdependence, especially with those whose worlds are fashioned differently than our own, or perhaps with those who would seek to harm or destroy our worlds, seems a nearly impossible task. Yet the Gospels prod us on.... At the furthest reaches of our capacities to love, we are urged, 'Love even your enemies.'"
- Wendy M. Wright
The Rising