Summer Extravaganza!

Final exams, final grades, senior reception planning and doing, graduation planning and doing. Done, done, done, and done. Ahhhh. I can finally breathe! What a lot of people don’t know is that I put a lot of my life on hold while I am teaching. I rarely go anywhere or do anything that will upset the delicate balance of my teaching life. I schedule and I plan. One wrong move, and I’m toast. I fall behind in work. I lose focus. I get tired.

I can’t say that I enjoy the extremes of this kind of life, but there are worse things. Anyway.

image by Billy Alexander (http://www.sxc.hu/profile/ba1969)

This year’s summer extravaganza is right around the corner. Plans for that are almost as crazy as the closing week of the spring semester and almost as ridiculous as last summer’s extravaganza to Europa, but at least the great majority of the extravaganza is closer to the fun side of life.

I – and we – are going to be all over the place this summer and it all starts this weekend. We are headed to visit my family for a couple of days. Then I’m off to Texas to be with my auntie for a week. She is away from home for 8 weeks so that she can undergo Cancer treatment. During part of my trip, the hubby is off to Las Vegas for worky worky stuff. Then I am home for a couple of days. A few days after hubby comes home, we are off on a little road trip to see a concert in North Carolina.

The following week, we’re back to NC to fly out to Los Angeles, the starting point of our summer vacation. That part of our trip is what I’m working on all this week. We are driving northward and then looping back down to LA via the Pacific Coast Highway. Any suggestions for sights and whatnot are welcomed. 🙂

After LA, we fly to Las Vegas to meet up with the hubby’s parents, who will be there for a convention/conference thing. We are headed to the Grand Canyon for a day and then we’ll piddle around Sin City.

Do you see a pterodactyl? You can make one of these lovely maps at Great Circle Mapper - http://www.gcmap.com

We return home after that. ahhh. June 24…. Then I have a couple more concert road trips scattered through the remaining days of summer break along with a couple of my own band’s gigs around town. And somewhere in there, I’ve heard we will be working in a road trip for my mother-in-law’s family reunion.

BUT it’s not all play time this summer. I’m prepping to take the GREs (yay… not) and I am taking a couple of classes. And I need to prep for a couple of new classes that I will be teaching in the fall.

What’s your story for the summer? Would you like to hide in my suitcase?