Welcome!

Hello, family and friends, and welcome to my travel blog! I titled it Becky Goes West for obvious reasons, but also because it was the first one that came to mind when brainstorming blog names and all the other ones were too long or too cheesy or too confusing and difficult to remember. (I really wanted to call it Bolin Goes West, using the corny fusion of mine and Colin's names that we came up with back when we first started hanging out, but I also wanted to be taken seriously by my readers, so that name ultimately lost.)

Although my moniker occupies the title and the storytelling will be from my perspective, this blog is documenting our shared journey, and I don't expect we will be separated from each other much save for bathroom trips. My undergraduate journalism training has instilled in me a fierce respect for one's intellectual property, so when I post a photo that Colin took (or if I let him get a word in), you will know by the proper attribution. 

I am presently writing this from my parents' living room couch, and as you can tell if you're paying any attention to the time stamp on this post, it's the early hours of Friday morning (what I still consider to be Thursday night since I haven't gone to sleep yet). Obviously we haven't left. Originally we had told everyone we were leaving Wednesday, which was a more-or-less arbitrarily chosen date for our departure because everyone kept asking and we felt we needed to pick something so we could plan toward a goal. As Wednesday approached and we still didn't have the vehicle situation straightened out, we realized we were looking more to Thursday or Friday. And as soon as the procrastinator in me realized that, I virtually stopped packing. Wednesday came and went and I had managed to go through all my clothing, deciding what to keep and what to donate to the clothing drive and what to hand down to my younger cousin Sami, yet I had barely begun to pack. The only thing I had packed was a box of sundresses, but to be fair, I had just taken the box out of the attic where I store the bulk of my summer clothes and in the process of sorting through the box, I had decided there wasn't anything I was willing to part with and thus re-folded all the dresses I'd taken out (about half) and placed them neatly back in the box to take with me to California. 

And here I sit, on my parents' couch after six consecutive hours of more sorting and packing, and this is what my room looks like:

And this is how I'll be leaving it tonight. Tomorrow is another day, I always like to say. It's a good thing we didn't leave on Wednesday.