Kansas Vacation!!

   What a great vacation. I mean, wow, it was the best thing ever! SUPER HUGE thanks to everyone who fed me and let me sleep on their couches for the last 10 days.

   So I think I'm going to break this up into a couple of installments, because otherwise it will be like 10 pages long and ain't nobody got time for that. First installment – Fall Fest. Second – climbing in Arkansas.

   I  left San Francisco on Thursday. For some mechanical reason, the jetway at SFO crapped out and it took them a super long time to fix it. So I missed my flight, despite running full-tilt down the entirety of the Denver airport. Good thing I gate-checked my suitcase, I guess. After standing in the customer service line for an hour with everyone else from my flight, I got a later flight to Kansas City. The whole time I was hardcore panicking because I was supposed to shadow a physician the next day, and if I couldn't shadow her, I wouldn't get her letter of recommendation, and then my entire med school career would be over before it had begun. Dark times. On the bright side, because I left Denver so late, the plane flew through a lightning storm! I SAW A LIGHTNING STORM FROM 33,000 FEET! 

It was totally worth missing my flight. It was absolutely gorgeous. Grace picked me up, drove me back to Lawrence, gave me a tour of the pharmacy school, and then I crashed onto the sofa and tried to sleep. Didn't work. I might have gotten four hours of sleep that night, between sleeping on a sofa, the blinking router light that I eventually covered with a sock, and the blinds that flapped in the wind.

   The next day, I got up SUUUUUUUPER early (especially considering I was still on California time, which is 2 hours earlier than Kansas) and drove BACK to Kansas City to do my shadowing. IT WAS SUPER AWESOME!!!!!! The doctor I shadowed is actually my high school biology teacher's daughter, so it was really great to have that hometown connection. And let me tell you – she does a great job of making a point to sit down and talk to her patients without spending the whole appointment staring at her computer screen and checking little boxes. It might take a little longer, but I really think it's the best way to do healthcare. She is a family practice physician, so we saw a really wide variety of cases. I walked in that morning knowing that I really wanted to be a family practice physician, and I walked out that afternoon being like “OH MY GOD I HAVE TO BE A FAMILY PRACTICE PHYSICIAN AND I SERIOUSLY DON'T SEE MYSELF DOING ANYTHING ELSE AND IF I DON'T GET TO DO THIS FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE, I MIGHT DIE.” So that was a very helpful experience.

   Grace and I drove from Lawrence to Bethel after a quick boba tea pit stop. We drove through some super heavy rain and a great sunset, which just reminded me how great sunsets are – what with the buildings and the hills, sunsets are hard to come by in the Bay Area. Upon arrival in Newton, I went over to Jackie and Ben's to meet the mod. We all managed to get together with ONE DAY'S notice, which is super impressive, considering that's something we had never been able to do when we actually all lived together. Half-price apps at the 'Bee are sort of our “thing” (and really, it's one of the only things to do in Newton after 9pm), so we headed out that way. It was really good to see all of them again, and to catch up on everything. It was a pretty late night by the time we eventually got out of there.

   The next morning was FALL FEST!!!!!!!!!!!! Melissa Volk said it best when she said “Fall Fest is kind of like Mennonite Christmas.” Everybody is all on campus again, everything is decorated and looks really nice, there is a ton of food and lots of hugging. Seriously, so much hugging. I just sort of walked in a circle around the Green about 6 times throughout the day, stopping and talking to everyone. It was the best feeling ever, and definitely one of the top five happiest days of the last year or so. 

New Year's cookies!

Lauren's first Fall Fest!

 At three, I met my family for the play “You Can't Take it With You.” It was VERY funny. I especially appreciated Jacob's steamboat noises – I guess he's gotten a LOT of compliments on that.

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrmphhhhhhh

   After a quick supper at Braum's, the family headed over to the football game. I could only stay for an hour or so because Eric was coming to pick me up to go climbing. The start of the game looked really good – from what I've heard, the team is really getting somewhere this year. Around 830, Eric showed up with his friend Mikael and we headed off on our climbing trip. More on that in the next post.