Back in May, I moved northeast out of Sandy into Cottonwood Heights, a stone’s throw from the canyon where I spent my winter.  I’m living with two ski instructors, Tim and Connie, and their two boys (10 & 8), plus three cats, one turtle, and one black Labrador/Great Dane mix.  It’s a house they built themselves, custom-designed to comfortably fit their six-foot-plus frames.  I need a step stool to reach the top shelves of the pantry, and I have to stand on my tip-toes to work at the countertop. The house is full of light, music, and color.  The windows at the front of the house are open to a panorama of the Wasatch Mountains.  There are speakers in every corner, even in the bathroom, and Jack Johnson, Michael Franti, Joni Mitchell, and Bruce Springsteen are regulars on the playlist. Photographs of family and friends plaster the fridge, walls and tables. My room is huge and bright, with six floor-to-ceiling windows.  It’s a room that begs to be decorated and inhabited.  For the first time, my few backpacking possessions seem inadequate, and within a week of moving in I’d already arranged to have my favorite Peruvian rug shipped to me from NH.  Tim and Connie’s is a house that feels like a home.

Though I endure rather than enjoy the city life, staying in Salt Lake through the summer has allowed me to take pleasure in being a part of a community of friends and their dogs, of rock-climbing partners, hikers, strong, creative women and outdoorsy men.  Winter relationships have grown and blossomed.  Chris, or Koogs, my skiing partner, has become my best friend and boyfriend, and partner in most things.  Together we’ve road-tripped to Colorado and to Utah’s Shakespeare capital to see Henry V.  We’ve hiked and biked and camped; gone to outdoor concerts, festivals, barbeques and parties; dog-sat, floated the Weber River on inner tubes, and soaked in the Diamond Fork hot springs.  Having someone with whom to share the summer enriched each moment and experience.

One of the summer’s highlights was a trip to Moab, Utah’s red rock Mecca and the gateway to Arches National Park.  Chris and I left Salt Lake one Friday night in May as the full moon was rising, and spent the weekend camping on top of a rock, with no roof over us but the stars.  On foot and on borrowed mountain bikes, we explored Edward Abbey’s desert paradise.  Early spring in the Utah desert means vivid green life against red buttes and mesas.  Biking before sunset on our second night, we turned a corner and observed a small grove of mature aspens standing in front of a sheer red wall.  Their bark glowed green in the low sunlight, and their slender branches curved gracefully, elegantly, as if frozen in the middle of a slow, twisting dance.  In that cool, potent moment, I believed we had found the lost Ent-wives of the Lord of the Rings.

As the warmth of the summer in the desert west fades and I look ahead to a second winter spent in Salt Lake City, it would be easy to be fearful, to wonder why I’m not moving on, as my custom has been.  Instead, I’m excited.  I feel like a new stage is coming in the life of Susan the Traveler.  The wave of serendipity that I’ve been surfing has become an eddy, a current swirling contrary to the main flow.  Though the pace has slowed, the voyage continues, and I’m happy to float on these friendly waters, trusting the swell to carry me where I belong.  I’ve got a new set of telemark skis and my old job at Brighton back, and I’m ready to make the most out of the winter and enjoy my new community of friends.  Let it snow!

Until then, please enjoy this holding music:

Home, home on the range
Where the deer and the antelope play
Where never is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day…

(I’m in Wyoming, USA – I’m living on a ranch – I’m learning to be a carpenter – I don’t have internet – The computer at this internet cafe doesn’t recognize the Word document in which I typed up a decent, long update – Sorry, folks)

(Oh, and life is good!!)

Dr. Gonzo’s been sold – handed over to a Kiwi girl about my age. Her boyfriend collects and rebuilds 1980s cars, and already has two cars almost identical to the Doc. After five days of stress and worry, I couldn’t have asked for a better outcome. I watched him float off, out of the car park and down Quay St. in central Auckland – it happened too quickly to hurt, and the relief of finally having it done has been salve enough. In many ways, I feel as though my trip has been over since I left the South Island at the end of April. The intervening three weeks have been a long, drawn out leave-taking. Like saying goodbye at a bus station, when the tears have been shed and the hugs passed around, the traveler sits in the window and the friends stand on the curb, both waiting self-consciously for the bus to pull away and make the cut clean. Three weeks ago, the Doc and I had one last night of quiet, beautiful solitude on the shores of Lake Onslow in Central Otago. The stars, and then the sunrise reflected on the purplish water as I looked back on the flowing river of my own memories. I said goodbye. I boarded the bus that night, and tonight, finally, it will leave the station and I, the traveler, will be able to turn away from the window where my friends still mime gestures of love, and can point my eyes to the road ahead.

So long, New Zealand…until we meet again.

And now there is a soft gray cat in my lap.  Oh, the simple pleasures.

If I visualize this period of transition as a piece of music, then at this moment what I am hearing is the quiet reflective melody that follows a particularly powerful crescendo: The Hollyford Mission!  It was a ten day trip, through the remote wilds of Fiordland in the southwestern corner of the South Island.  Three days tramping along the beaten path of the Hollyford River valley with a few other hardy souls, three days living in a hut on the beach waiting for bad weather to clear, and four days of complete solitude on the hardest trail I’ve ever walked.  On day one, I hiked 30 km (18 miles – Huge.) and felt six of my ten toes and the bottom of my right heel develop large, swollen blisters.  On day three, I found myself caught out in a torrential downpour, complete with jagged bolts of lightning and crashing thunder, on the wrong side of a flooded river, and had to spend the night huddled between flax plants in a wet tent in a wet sleeping bag.  On day four, I waited for the eye of the storm, packed all of my (sopping wet) gear, crossed the river, and all but sprinted the last three kilometers to the Big Bay Hut.  Big Bay (as the name would suggest), is a large, rectangle-shaped bay on the northern coast of Fiordland.  It’s accessible only by helicopter, small fixed-wing planes, or a four day walk from the nearest road.  Remote.  Beautiful.  Even in the throes of the storm, the wild seas and gray, rocky beach were magic.  What a place to be stuck.

I waited out the weather for two and a half days, and could have easily let myself forget the outside world and simply stay.  There were three surfers stranded with me for the first day, waiting for a break in the clouds so that their airplane could land on the beach and take them home.  Before they left they introduced me to our neighbor, a hunter named Aussie Bob, who was spending a few weeks in his private hut a kilometer further down the beach.  When the surfers finally soared away, it was just Bob and me and the beach and the wind and rain.  Bob was perhaps fifty years old, a sheep-shearer, and for 17 years had been hunting the coast and hills of northern Fiordland.  I wished, repeatedly, that I had a tape recorder to capture the stories he shared.  A genuine, multi-faceted individual, a true man of the land who could gauge deer’s bloodlines from the shape of the antlers of the stags he’d killed.  He described himself as a redneck, but he was the most open-minded and accepting redneck I’ve ever met.  “Different strokes for different folks,” he’d say as he shook his head over the lifestyles of the various people he’s met in his long and varied life.  He wasn’t sure what to make of me at first: a young woman on her own in the absolute last frontier of the NZ bush, confident of my abilities yet responsible and aware of the risks of the back country and the measures needed to counter them.  I walked down the beach to his hut the first night to listen to the weather forecast on his mountain radio, and stayed to chat over a can of beer.  As he listened to my stories of Antarctica and past tramping experience, I could see his respect for my independence grow at the same time as he sought to protect me.  Bob sent me home with flour and yeast to bake bread in my hut’s camp oven, and the next afternoon showed up with fresh venison back steaks (the nicest part of the animal) wrapped in a plastic bag.  These I cooked in a curry, using the ingredients that the surfers had left behind.  Venison curry and fresh bread baked on a wood stove in a little hut on the beach in Fiordland in NZ.  I’m not sure that cuisine gets any better than that.

For two days, life took on a simplicity and a peace that I would find difficult to recapture.  In the mornings, I stoked the fire, got it roaring, with a kettle on top of the stove for tea, then ventured out to the beach to check the weather and gather more driftwood to feed the fire.  The water would be hot when I got back, and Bob would pop in and join me for a cuppa while spinning yarns about his work and his misadventures as a young, redneck Aussie visiting New Zealand for the first time.  After tea I’d have a wash at the faucet behind the hut, sweep out the sand, mix up a batch of bread dough to rise, then sit and read and watch the birds, fantails, wax-eyes and tomtits, swoop and dive outside the window.  Eventually the rain stopped and I could go for walks on the beach, taking pictures and collecting shells.  In the evenings I’d walk over to Bob’s hut to catch the weather and listen to his stories.  I’d inevitably show up barefoot (it was warm enough, and it was easier than putting on wet hiking boots), which would make Bob shake his head.  ”You’re a tough bitch, aren’t you?” he said, in a tone of deep respect and admiration.  The night before I left, three of Bob’s hunting mates arrived by fixed-wing plane, and he invited me to come over for a roast (wild boar, pumpkin, kumara).  There I sat, smack in the middle of a kiwi hunting “man’s weekend”…how did I get here?  I marveled.

The rest of the trip was along the Pyke River valley: tough going.  This was a track that sought to break me.  It had already sent blisters, lightning, wind, rain, floods.  The second half tried to turn me back with fallen trees, mud, lakes, suffocating bush, thorns, vines, roots, slips, trips, falls, cuts, and bruises.  It thrashed me good, and then dared me to keep going – and I did.  Yet my memories are tinged with a glowing sort of magic.  I saw no one.  Red deer grazed along the sides of the rivers, and stags roared terrifyingly in the bush.  A NZ falcon swooped down from its lofty perch to examine me close up.  At one side creek, I balked at the murky orange water of questionable depth and the half-submerged tree stumps that poked out ominously.  Instead of walking through it, I took a gamble on a fallen tree that conveniently bridged the 8-foot creek.  It was narrow and smooth.  Too narrow and smooth.  So much for my dry sleeping bag and my mobile phone!  The next day I walked around Lake Wilmot, a small lake made nearly impassable by windfalls – it took me four hours to cover one kilometer.  Next was the Black Swamp, where I had to leap between tiny tussock mounds to avoid the sucking, stinking mud that at one point swallowed both of my legs up to my groin.  On the last day, I walked five kilometers through Lake Alabaster (yes, I had to walk IN the lake), climbing over slippery rocks and fallen trees, staring tiredly through my raincoat hood (it was raining again) at the waterfalls pouring down the cliffs on the other side of the lake.  Like the creature from the Black Lagoon, I rose from the lake at the end of the day, trudged wetly across the beach to the hut, and stood solidly on the porch.  I turned and surveyed the length of the lake I’d just conquered, and cheered.  The Hollyford – Pyke/Big Bay Mission: DONE!!  Satisfaction supreme.

24 April, 2007

(A real time update: Kelli and I are in Taupo, in the middle of the North Island, and all is well.  More to come as the (mis)adventures continue!)

A brief recap of the past weeks…
I spent six days out in the mountains with Lumir, hiking all the way up the Rakaia River, learning to route-find and cross rivers.  We had exquisitely hot weather, which he complained about and I reveled in.  I found myself to be in pretty wretched shape after six months of inactivity, but it felt wonderful to be out and about, getting sunburned and dirty, living on cous cous and porridge.  I could feel the Ice just melting off me.  We climbed a glacier and ate breakfast one morning on the top of a mountain at the head of the Rakaia valley.  Gorgeous!!  It rained our last day – the first rain I’d seen in six months – and we arrived back at Jenny’s wet, cold, tired and muddy.  I got to spend some quality time catching up with Jenny (the woman I was working for before leaving for Antarctica) and helping Lumir pack 50 kilos worth of photo equipment, clothing, and hiking gear into a 32 kilo luggage limit.  Then it was back to Christchurch…Lumir’s last night was spent on the Banks Peninsula, out on a sagging jetty.  We drank, and toasted each other, and slept curled up together in Dr. Gonzo, only to wake at 3:30 AM to make the long, foggy drive back to the city to get him to the airport on time.  It was sad to see him go…

It was odd to be in Christchurch.  Too many people, too much traffic – and too many people from the Ice.  It was odd, how we all seemed to feel this lack of interest in each other.  Suddenly we had nothing to talk about, and wanted only to move on, out of the city to where we didn’t know anybody.  I did get to catch up with Mike and Stephen, though, friends from Tekapo and the Godley, which was a very fun blast from the past.  I was quite happy to leave the city, though, this past Thursday, and head over to the West Coast, where the Jacobs have been keeping me busy with art festivals in town, badminton, and a night of fishing out at the beach under a full moon during which I managed to catch my first shark, despite initially casting my hooks onto the sand next to me…

This place (the green, lush, alive place) is the perfect antidote to the Ice.  NZ’s West Coast is my favorite.  Beaches, mountains, rain forest – the Anti-Ice.  I’m loving it.  I’m missing Lumir, and I’m still feeling a bit off balance in this warm, bright world, but every day I wake up to the sunlight streaming through the porthole next to my bed, and the chattering of cicadas in the palms outside, and I hear the ocean and I close my eyes and imagine that I’m floating…

It’s about 70 degrees F, the sun is out, I’m wearing a skirt and no shoes, and I just woke up from a nap in a sunny patch of grass with Lumir. In the last 24 hours (less than, actually), I’ve eaten ice cream (mochaccino), breathed deeply of the intensely humid air, walked barefoot through knee-high grass, cruised down an empty highway in Dr. Gonzo with my feet out the window, and stared in stupefied wonder at sheep, trees, flowers, grass, bugs, nighttime, etc.

And I’m with Lumir.

Sweet as.

If the three helicopters arriving at the heli-pad less than a hundred feet from my window were an alarm waking me from the deep, satisfying sleep of winfly, then yesterday and today have been the equivalent of the early morning stumble to the bathroom. Everything is painfully bright; my head is fuzzy and full of dark thoughts about being out of my warm bed; seeing even a single person standing at the bathroom sink is too many. On Tuesday morning of last week, there were 395 individuals residing at McMurdo. By Tuesday afternoon, there were nearly 500. Poor weather on Wednesday and Thursday put a temporary hold on the onslaught, but Friday dawned clear and Saturday clearer. Three planes between those two days brought the population to a seemingly seam-bursting 678. Fasten your seat belts, kids. From zero to sixty in fractions of a second. Warp speed, dead ahead!

New people. And lots of ‘em. I’m feeling shell-shocked, slightly (recent experiments in sleep deprivation and all-night dance marathons have probably contributed to this). The winter-overs…I think they’re in hiding. I’ve seen my few winter friends who are still in residence. I’m put off balance by the changes; some of them are close to unhinged, although they are buoyed by the fact that they are days away from getting on a plane themselves.  I, on the other hand, look around and see four long months with these indistinct shapes and figures who are my future, and I mourn for the days past.  When we (winter/winfly people) meet in the galley or in the bar our eyes are panicked, glazed until we make eye contact and cling gratefully to each other for the rest of the night, protecting one another from the rough, featureless blur of unfamiliar faces. Change is scary.

How quickly things change. Six weeks ago I was as shiny and new as the recent arrivals – newer, even. I’m still a FNG, whereas many of the “new” people have decades of Antarctic time under their belts. And yet I’ve developed a fierce possessiveness for the town, the people, the places. Who’s hung their coat on my hook?  How dare she sit at my table? I remember my first week here.  The winter-overs spoke in riddles, inside jokes, and told raucous stories of departed friends.  It was a wall, carefully and deliberately built in order to preserve their separateness from the newcomers, the interlopers.  It was self-preservation, I realize now, and understand, at least on some small scale.  Goodbyes are hard.  And when followed immediately with two to three hundred new “hellos,” the sadness overwhelms: an emptiness.

Lighter and lighter – the days are growing.  Sun rise: 5:34 AM.  Sun set: 9:54 PM, though the colors from both events spread and glow for hours when the skies are clear.  I’m going to miss the colors in the sky.  We’ve bid farewell to the stars.  The dead of night is now little more than dusk.  And it’s heating up.  +12F (-11C) today.  When the wind is still, the air actually feels warm on my face.  The snow on my dorm melts in the sun and then refreezes, forming icicles in the cold air.  It’s the end of winfly, and the start of mud season.  Nearly two months down…

It’s been six weeks.  It feels like forever.  Long enough that this bizarre place has begun to feel comfortable and familiar.  Normal.  Just in time for everything to change.  The time period known as “winfly” (“winter flight” – six weeks during which the ice runway is built and town is prepared for the bustle of the summer season) came to a smooth but sudden halt early this afternoon when the first C-17 of mainbody touched down.  It circled once, a tiny black bird that grew steadily larger as it approached.  I stood with several others on Hut Point and applauded when the wheels made contact with the blue stretch of sea ice two miles outside of town.  The applause was both heartfelt and sarcastic.  We cheered the skill of the pilots and the excitement of watching planes land on a frozen ocean in Antarctica, and we grimaced as we thought of the one hundred souls who were about to be released on us.  One hundred people today, another hundred tomorrow…by Saturday our population will have almost tripled.  Life is about to get exponentially more interesting.

The night at the coffee house was perhaps a week ago; each night since has grown progressively brighter.  The continent awakes, gradually easing out of winter hibernation.  People are keeping track of “firsts”: first blue sky; first day of positive degrees on the thermometer; first time sunglasses are necessary; first seal sighted outside of town.  Among the firsts and the excitement, another population is counting the “lasts.”  The winter-overs, the last of the winter workforce, are saying their goodbyes, making their peace, preparing to reenter the world.  Some have been here for six months, others twelve, and a few awe-inspiring folks are tallying their fourteenth straight month on the ice.  I, the FNG, watch the behavior patterns and interactions, understanding only a fraction of the emotions that emanate from their faces in visible waves.

Winter, or the idea of spending a winter here is a compelling consideration.  I’m being seduced by the bonds that I see among the community of winter-overs.  Andre (a twelve-monther: http://mcpenguin.livejournal.com) has given me the singular, weighty blessing of being “A Groovy Person,” a distinction which acts as a passcode and allows me entrance to the winter-over clubhouse.  These kids rock.  If wintering in Antarctica means I get to hang with these guys and others like them for six solid months, sign me up.  They’re not friends; they’re family.  The love is a perceptible thing; it’s the sunshine that brightens the six months of night.  The allure of these relationships is offset by a certain sense of pain and awfulness.  These are not easy bonds to break, and as I’ve been told on several occasions, Antarctica is about goodbyes.  It’s hard to describe.  Although, I don’t feel that I have the right to discuss the pain of separation.  I’ve been here for a mere six weeks.  The sadness I felt today as I watched the first twenty departees board the bus to the runway is laughable when I see the tears, the embraces, the brave clasping of hands.

I seem to be living a life of extremes.  It is exhausting.  Joy to sorrow, contentment to anxiety, calm to stress.  Each day runs the gamut.  One day feels like four; a week is a lifetime.  It is fitting, however, to live this way, in this place.  There’s a sticker sold in the shop here that reads: “It’s a harsh continent.”  Yes.

One word: weird.

Good, more than good, but jeez louise, odd as.  Arrived in Cali Monday afternoon, and spent that night, Tuesday and Wednesday nights with Beeker in San Jose.  Heat!  Cars!  People!  People! The entire freakin’ population of NZ in one city!  Can you say ‘culture shock’?  Driving back from the airport, every time we turned a corner or paused at an intersection, my brain started convulsing, telling me “Wrong side of the road, wrong side!”, making me twitch and mutter involuntarily, expecting a horrible head on crash at any moment.  Later, seeing Jay Leno on TV, I was amazed, commenting, “Wow, we don’t usually get him on TV2, do we?”  Slowly, slowly things began to fall into place, and after the first 24 hours I could accept and recognize that I was no longer in NZ.  Which drew me to the inevitable, cringing understanding that I was in America.  Each Hummer, each waving flag, each “support our troops” ribbon and Wal-Mart billboard I saw hit me like a graffitied brick wall: painful and offensive.  I think I was born to be an ex-pat.

Homecoming, true homecoming occurred several days later – in the wee hours of Friday morning, after a satisfyingly tearful family reunion and a two hour drive from the Boston airport.  Home, however, no longer exists in reality as it does in my twenty-three years of memories.  There’s a new house, for one thing, a gorgeous, stylish and comfortable palace that my parents have been pouring their hearts and souls into for the past year.  It’s beautiful, a true accomplishment, and their pleasure and happiness at finally crossing the threshold of their dreams is apparent in their glowing faces as they give me the grand tour.  For me it means another unfamiliar kitchen in which I will hunt for knives and napkins, another new bed, another bathroom sink on which to rest my toiletry bag.  “Home” suddenly seems lost, impossible and inaccessible.  Framed photographs, small knick-knacks, a rocking chair, a blanket: old friends in a sea of new faces that give me something to cling to as I ride the waters of change.  How to reconcile a need for familiarity with a thirst for travel and newness?

I have changed; it is difficult to see the same change in others, people and places.  Change requires strong countenance – but how can the branches grow toward the sun if the roots too seek the sky?  I am learning: the branches and the roots spring from one heart.  Change in one must create change in the other, for the support goes both ways, big step building on bigger step, multiplying exponentially until roots and branches both can feel alive, fulfilled.  Home, it seems, is truly no further than the heart, for it is from there that love, succor, and companionship dwell.  And my heart?  It’s here, with my family, with my friends.  New house, new jobs, new lives aside, I am grateful for the opportunity to brace myself against their familiarity, to draw strength from their stalwartness and feel inspired by their own transformations.  And my heart is far away, over the seas and under a different sky, waiting quietly while I drink my fill, waiting for me to return, ready to set sail once more.  Balance, duality, adapting, learning…

August 13th is the shipping date; leaving on a jet plane from Manchester, NH at 9:00 AM.

I’m going!

I’m going to Antarctica!!

::unintelligible shrieks of joy and amazement::

Oh, wow.  Wow, wow, and yes, wow.

Life, at the moment, is so good that it hurts.  So good, in fact, that you see I write it out in plain English, without fear or superstition that I might somehow jinx my good fortune.

Jenny has been fantastic – supportive, excited, helpful and somehow as proud as if she were my own parent.  I think I have learned a valuable lesson from the several weeks of stress and secrecy leading up to now.  I should have given her a lot more credit.  Everything, everything is falling into place.  My time in NZ has been a study in serendipity, and it would seem that the Great Antarctic Adventure is getting off to a start just as fortuitous.  I’ve found someone to store Dr. Gonzo for me for $1/day, indoors, out of the elements.  He’ll be here waiting for me when I get back!  Knowing that I don’t have to say goodbye to him is incredibly reassuring.

Lumir, my photographer friend, has come to spend my last week with me, helping me pack, making me laugh, accompanying me to Christchurch to sort out plane tickets and other details, helping me work around the backpackers, cooking, feeding me wine, taking me camping, taking pictures to document all the excitement, and generally making my last week a real cracker.  And, the best part – this isn’t my last week in NZ.  I’m coming back!  I’ll finish in Antarctica in early December or early January, have a happy reunion with the Doc, and essentially pick up where I’ve left off.  Lumir will still be here, as will Moni, the Beveridges, Angus, Jim, the Wellington crew, and the whole gorgeous country.  Going to Antarctica isn’t a huge, scary change – merely a detour.  A scenic excursion of sorts, a temporary holiday from the holiday.  An extremely lucrative detour: full pay and benefits, and minimal expenses for six months = money in the bank to fund further travels!

A question has been raised about my intentions…what am I running away from?  I realize that this all began as a sort of gap year before having to make decisions about careers and life and such, but what started as a trip, a holiday, has morphed, slowly but completely, into life.  Simple as that.  This is no longer a break before real life…this is my real life.  This is what I want to do.  See the world, soak it in, drink it up, live.  I am happy.  To settle, at this point, would be a lie.  I don’t mean to say that I’m never going to grow tired of being rootless.  I will.  But not yet.  If I’m running from anything, it’s a life of stagnation, routine, of two weeks of holidays a year, commuting, paying bills, working for the weekends.  Why should I follow that path?  I only have one opportunity, one life, and while that sounds dramatic and perhaps a bit morbid, it seems ludicrous to spend even one moment doing something that isn’t fulfilling, something that doesn’t make me happy to be alive and grateful for each breath I take.

The hardest thing is knowing that some of you will not understand.  You, all of you, are immensely, hugely important to me.  You are the pillars that hold up the framework of my life.  And yet here I am, choosing a lifestyle that is going to take me away from you all for an indefinite length of time.  Because NZ, and now Antarctica, are just the beginning.  Lumir, ever the philosopher, says (in his delicious eastern European accent) says, “Hey man, that is the Tax.”  It’s the price of living a dream.  The cost is dear, measured in heartache and homesickness, but right now, it is worth it.

On to the business end – I am coming home!  I land in San Francisco on Monday, July 24, and (pending making arrangements with Beeker), will be flying into Manchester shortly thereafter.  I’ll have about two and a half weeks at home, and I want to see as many of you as humanly possible!  I leave again for Christchurch and then the Ice on August 14th.  It’s going to be short – but sweet.  I’ll keep you updated.  I love you, I love you, I love you, I CAN’T WAIT to see you.

Yahoooooo!!!!