One of the great things about knowing so many people on the east coast is there is never a shortage of invitations to escape the city for a few days. One of the problems with attending a music conservatory is the extremely limited number of opportunities for actually accepting such invitations. In fact, aside from Christmas and Spring Break, I believe Thanksgiving is the only time all year when I am given more than a single extra consecutive day of vacation.

And so it is that I am currently sitting on a bus which, I’ve just discovered, has wireless Internet, heading down to Baltimore. Most people ask if I’m going home and then are terribly confused because they all believe - correctly, of course - that I live in Colorado. A bus ticket costs less than 10% of a plane ride home, however, and I’ve been promising my friend Nick that I would visit for about four years now. He lives out on the Chesapeake Bay, but I won’t actually be going there because we are going directly from the bus station to his famiy’s house in rural Pennsylvania.

School technically lets out tomorrow, but the situation is more complicated due to the required number of class sessions for the semester. Suffice it to say that I have nothing academic on the morning and was therefore able to leave early. I’ll be back very late on Sunday night, which will
make the next school day rather interesting, but I ought to be able to sleep on the bus.

I hadn’t realized how much I miss open sky, grass, and trees. Manhattan has none of these, though it has its own attractions and is such an utterly different world that I haven’t had any chance yet to be homesick. It will be nice to visit again over Christmas, but I really do already feel completely at home in NYC. I can objectively remember that I once lived somewhere else, but that already seems like the life of another person.

Happy Thanksgiving!