A Penske Truck, A Malibu, and 573.74 miles later...

by Alisha

This past Monday, Micah and I started our migration south. We caravaned from Milwaukee to Independence, Missouri, where Micah's dad lives. Thankfully, we are able to store all of our things with Micah's dad for the next 2 years. It was a strange feeling to see all of our possessions loaded into our small rental truck and to say goodbye to Milwaukee and the friends we had made there over the past three years. On the other hand it felt pretty refreshing to be able to simplify things a bit and to sell furniture and one of our cars. It was surprisingly difficult to say goodbye to Luminescence, our pristine '95 Lumina.


The long trip to was very uneventful and both vehicles and all of our stuff survived. Luckily, I have had quite a bit of experience driving "Big Sexy" a certain moving truck at my last job with Lad Lake. We are now looking forward to spending time with friends and family and are in for a busy month of weddings, graduations, and family gatherings.


During the long drive, aside from listening to NPR, I thought of a couple of things that are bringing me some anxiety when thinking about living in Peru.

First and foremost, I have an underlying fear that for some reason, I will be absolutely unable to learn Spanish no matter what. This is most likely selling myself short, but who knows. I hope that I can put my frustrations aside and not compare myself to the language abilities of Micah or other members of our training group. Really the only other thing aside from the possibility that I will not be able to communicate with anyone for the next two years, would be being sick for the entire two years. Since the possibility of both of these things is pretty minimal, I am really getting excited to go!

Plus I figure that if you can survive driving a truck across Wisconsin and Iowa that anything is possible.

Unemployment & Packing

by Micah

Welcome to our first blog entry. We're still a little over one month away from leaving for Peru, but in the meantime, we're feverishly preparing for our Midwest Mega-tour 2008 with stops in Missouri, Nebraska, and South Dakota.

Alisha and I finished up our jobs last week, so, as this entry's title says, we are unemployed. Personally, unemployment has provided me with much more satisfactory responses to some of life's salient questions than the work world ever could. For instance, now that I'm jobless, the answer to the question, "Should I shave today?" is a resounding "NO!", and when I consider whether or not sweatpants constitute appropriate attire for the day's activities, I can gleefully answer "YES!" Heady stuff, I know.

Alisha's last day of work was Friday, and her co-workers kindly threw her a going-away party, complete with enormous steaks and the appropriately decorated cake seen above. My fellow interpreters are throwing a bash for me (along with another departing co-worker) on Saturday, so that should be nice. In the meantime, we have been and will continue to be packing up our apartment (that's me with the sweatband after a long day of packing) so as to vacate our apartment by next Monday (28 April) and kick off the first Missouri leg of the aforementioned Mega-tour. Between attending farewell festivities and boxing up our astonishing collection of books, we're trying to see as many of the good friends we've made in Milwaukee as possible. Stay tuned for more pre-departure exploits...