Goodbye Town

Three weeks from today, I’ll be leaving my home of two years on Kwajalein Island, Republic of the Marshall Islands (about halfway between Australia and Hawaii). Here I have experienced many new adventures, including scuba diving, sailing, deep sea fishing, flying in a helicopter to many other little islands, witnessing test rockets shoot across the sky, my first solar eclipse, and so much more.

As you’d expect, it’s had some ups and downs, but overall has been great and I am glad I came. It’s time for me to go, though, and my next career move as a meteorologist is to go somewhere with more interesting weather than “86F, partly sunny, and a 10% chance of showers” nearly every day. 🙂

I am super excited that after leaving Kwajalein and visiting family in the Northwest US (which I am quite excited about too), I will be moving to Wellington, New Zealand, to work at their national weather service. I arrive there 6 weeks from today!!!! 😀

Without waxing too nostalgic (yeah, yeah, I know), I will miss some things about Kwajalein, but most of all I will miss some of the people. I’ve always said this place is worse than a college town with the high turnover, and it can be hard to build up good friendships when working contract positions. I have been saying goodbye to an increasing number of my friends and acquaintances over the last couple months or so, as some people I know are also moving or going on their summer vacations and won’t be back until after I leave. After a couple more goodbyes yesterday, I suddenly felt ready to just jump on the next plane out.

My plane is coming soon enough though, and I’ve got to try to enjoy the rest of my time here in the tropics, as it’ll be here before I know it and I’ll be heading to winter in the Southern Hemisphere!

Thank you for visiting and welcome to my new blog! I plan to fill it mostly with posts and photos of my travels around the world. There isn’t much here now, but check back frequently for updates as I set it up.