End Act 2

Tomorrow, I leave my second internship. It's been a cosmically odd final week in the Northwest: Estrella is shut-down, the rainy fall suddenly sets in after mostly beautiful weather, I'm stalked all the way to the farm by a crazed hillbilly with some serious road rage. As for the rest of the two months, it has been incredibly rewarding to work with Meg and Brad and I'm fortunate to have found their farm (and lucky that they took me on).

Time for me to figure out the next step. I may have an opportunity in the works. It's not official yet, so I'll leave you in suspense until it is. One thing I know is that I still feel like I have a lot to learn about cheese. My high school theology teacher once told me that I'm not satisfied until I feel as though I've learned or seen every aspect of a subject -- it's not necessarily that I have to master it, but I at least need to know why or that it exists. Dude was crazy good at psychoanalyzing me. It's probably the reason I create lists of questions I forget to ask. It's probably why I spent one Saturday night Googling academic articles on milk composition. I am a little OCD about knowledge. Regardless of whether I even retain it, I want to hoard it for some dark corner of my brain. I do feel like I could learn a lot from another internship, or another class at VIAC, or a trip to Europe, or job in a small cheese shop, a big cheese shop and a medium-sized cheese shop. Obviously, I can't do everything. At a certain point, I need to stop hoarding knowledge and experiences and just do something.

For now, I'm going on an epic road trip again! Tad will be working in Del Rio, Texas for the next year. So I'll be driving down to Houston for Thanksgiving with my family and visiting Tad in Del Rio at least until New Years. As soon as further plans have been made official for me, I'll let you know. All I know is that it will likely involve heading back to the east coast at the end of Winter. For now, I'll be living out of my car again. This time I'm making the trip with my high school friend, Kim. The next few weeks, I'll be posting mostly about road trip adventures instead of cheese -- unless, of course, the road trip adventures involve cheese. To give you an idea of my near circumnavigation of the country this year and the epicness of both road trip 1 and road trip 2, chew on these maps:

Click on thumbnail to see Road Trip 1

Click on thumbnail to see Road Trip 2