Vacation after less than a month

One of the additional things that comes with interning at GM is GM's set of shutdowns and holidays.  While not all locations are closed for the week over July 4th, mine was which enabled me to be part of an annual family vacation.  While our family vacation was in northern Vermont, which, certainly, was a drive away, additional side trips made my travel last week (all by car), look like this:

That is 2013 miles of driving right there folks - six states and two countries

The view from the deck of a cabin we rented in Vermont - plus some riff-raff :-)

It was a great trip though, and it included family, friends and my boyfriend, so it was worth all the time in the vehicle.  Stopped in PA, then went to the test drive event in NJ, saw our college friends of now many years in NYC, went up to Vermont for seven days (we swam in Lake Champlain, played tennis, went biking, splashed in water falls, saw immature bald eagles, hiked and ate lots of good food), scooted over to Ottawa for a concert (Iron Maiden headlined Ottawa's BluesFest - sorry, I don't have pictures), stopped in PA again and then went back home.

The view from the building we stayed in in VT - it was built in the late 1700s!

In Vermont, in the plant tour spirit, we stopped at Otter Creek Brewery to...see them bottling beer
(we also stopped at a store that made bow ties called Beau Ties and drove by the brewery that makes Woodchuck Hard Cider)

Yup, just going to look at the bottling...

On our hike we saw remnants of iron ore mining camps on the western side of Lake Champaign

The bushes in the foreground were actually wild blueberries, so I nibbled on a couple

I now know for sure that one way to stay occupied on long trips is an audiobook.  I started Steve Jobs' (unabridged) biography on a drive from Boston to Pennsylvania back in March; I listened to it a whole bunch on this trip and I am still not done (remember, I said unabridged).  Despite the length, it's been very interesting to hear a more intimate history of things you're familiar with and have lived through.  I wish school taught more modern history rather than often stopping at WWII.  Anyway, that's a tangent.

Somehow it's the middle of July.  I was on a roll writing posts in June and then between vacation and business travel and then trying to catch up on wonderfully mundane things like laundry, I've been thrown out of the groove I had gotten into.  Well, here in Michigan it's not as hot as it was, but it's still regularly reaching the upper 80s or low 90s.  The class of 2013 just had our first phone call back with the LGO/MIT mothership concerning internship deilverables (yes, ok, we do occasionally have homework) and it felt strange but nice to be hearing people's voices again.  We're in grad school still but this internship thing is pretty excellent.