fojee

Hello!

So since I last posted, I reached the gathering site in Alberta (a very swanky "cabin" in the Canadian Rockies, and I will not be any more specific than that, thank you very much). The get-together was WONDERFUL, which is unsurprising, but alas all good things must end so the vast majority of people left Sunday morning (July 20) in order to fly home (or in one case catch a bus to Banff). I drove northeast to Drumheller, leaving around 11ish, and that was the only day where I had to stop on the side of the road to pee in a ditch because Google Maps decided to route me via county roads through the middle of nowhere so I had no chance to find a gas station.

The Royal Tyrell Museum was EXCELLENT and I highly recommend a visit to anyone who has the chance. If you have the time, arrive in the morning to take a badlands hiking tour (this obviously did not work with my schedule), but the museum itself is still damn cool. I then spent the night in a "hotel" that was 7 rooms above an Indian restaurant. The room was fine! It was just kind of a surprise. But on the bright side, I bought a double order of garlic naan for an evening snack and proceeded to munch on that as car snacks for the next two days.

I also bought a t-shirt, a pair of socks, and a travel mug (no handle, has a tea-and-dinosaurs pun) from the museum gift shop. No regrets!

Monday the 21st I drove back south into the US and then took the Going-To-The-Sun Road from east to west through Glacier National Park. (I had previously acquired an America The Beautiful pass which gets you into ALL national parks, plus any sites managed by the Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Fish and Wildlife Service, USDA Forest Service, and US Army Corps of Engineers that charge an entrance fee.) Glacier is fucking BEAUTIFUL. Due to time constraints (and also weather; it was gray and drizzly during most of my visit) I didn't do any proper hiking, but I did get to walk upstream along Siyeh Creek for a little way.

I spent Monday night at a motel in Kalispell, west of Glacier, where I was able to wash a load of laundry. And I will post about the rest of my trip another day.

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In non-trip news, I am currently staying at Vicky's house while she is off on her own two-week road trip. She is circling through Chicago, Pittsburgh, NJ, DC, South Carolina, Tennessee, and then Chicago again on her way home to Minnesota. Meanwhile I am dogsitting Alfie, bringing in her mail, and generally making her house look lived-in rather than vacant.

What I get out of this is A) some distance from our parents, which is nice (I love them but it's still fundamentally awkward to live in their basement as a middle-aged adult); B) BETTER INTERNET (my parents' wifi works fine for anything word-based but is frankly tragic about images, gifs, and videos); and C) the company of one of the world's most adorable dogs. <3

In job search news, I have applied to two Not The IRS offices in the Twin Cities area (annoyingly you can't apply for a region -- you have to apply to each office individually). I have also updated my resume and tomorrow I am going to poke at LinkedIn until I can figure out how best to upload it and start refining my job search terms.

Also I may have fallen down a rabbit hole reading Ask A Manager columns, but shhh, we'll keep that as our little secret. ;)