leaving the nest

Welp, training is all over.  After a crazy five days in the Canyons (beautiful, by the way) we headed back to the classroom for a few days and on Wednesday our group graduated to become full-fledged Backroads trip leaders.  Now they are flinging us across the country and I think the good-byes were harder than anyone anticipated.

The most exciting part of the week was getting our schedules.  They handed them out to us and it was complete chaos.  I will admit that I was chanting "Hawaii, Hawaii, Hawaii..." over and over in my head but when I unfolded the paper and it read Yellowstone I celebrated like I had been dreaming of Yellowstone my whole life.  The hysterical part is that I wasn't completely sure where Yellowstone was exactly.  Heidi told me it was in Montana, but really I'll be in Wyoming.  Wyoming.  Can you believe it!?  Haha!  If you had told me when I was drinking wine and eating baguettes last year in Paris that I would spend the next summer camping in Wyoming.  I would have laughed out loud.  But, man oh man, am I excited.  Word on the street is that Yellowstone/Tetons is one of the best regions to lead in.  There will be 30 of us going in and out of the leader house... sounds like Real World Jackson Hole, huh, Rosie?)  Here's a taste of what my summer holds:
http://backroads.com/trips/MYTQ

Training was an intense process and I'm sad to see us all splitting up.  I know a lot of the friends I made in the last three weeks will be my friends for life and I'm fortunate enough to be bringing a few of them with me up to the Tetons.  In all, I'm really happy to have had the experience (and the job hasn't even really started yet!) its funny that the things I was so worried about (bike mechanics, driving the van, etc) turned out to be easy-peasy when all was said and done.  I must have said the phrase "I've never done this before!" about a million times. 

List of firsts:
Re-cabling a bike
Camping
Driving a can with a trailer
Successfully backing that van and trailer between to ominous trees
Pitching a tent
Taking down a tent (while hungover)
I had my longest bike ride ever into 100mph head winds (seriously hard)
Hiking a top ten worldwide hike (Angel's Landing)

And that's just the tip of the iceburg.

Tomorrow I fly to San Francisco.  My first official duty as a BR leader is to pick up a van in SF on Tuesday and drive it back to Salt Lake City.  Then a couple days later I load up the van, hitch it to a trailer, and drive it to Jackson Hole, WY. I'm doing all of this driving completely solo. 

Ai yi yi... I guess its all happening...

pictures to come!