travelling

So far, I've made it to Philly. Tomorrow is when the real fun begins- all of us trainees finally get to meet each other for like a 24-hour conference in town. We do some pre-departure training, get some shots, and then we fly out the next evening. It'll then be a couple days of travelling, from here to Paris to Ouagadougou, and from then on I don't really know what the schedule will be.

I'm glad for this stopover tonight, in part because it means I did all of my crazy packing last night and this morning. I measured all my bags and weighed them twice, and I'm fairly confident that everything's regulation, but I have this really sad image in my mind of a lonely little pile of art supplies and books lying in a corner of the airport because my bags were overweight. I was initially going to go all basic, just the bare essentials- I'd love to be the really cool travel girl who just has a single duffel, or a framepack, for the entire two years. And it did start out that way. But it feels like I added one superfluous item and the floodgates opened, and now my luggage is overstuffed and it's a battle to close each zipper. Ah well. Be prepared?