White Mountains, NH

I had no big travel plans this semester as I settled into life as a MBA student, but thought I should put a blogpost together for our quick trip to the White Mountains over Fall Break last month, as well as give a little update for the last post of this decade!

I can’t even imagine the beginning of the decade, when I was just finishing up my last year of high school. Since then, I’ve gotten 3 degrees (working on my 4th and last…), moved cities 3.5 times (hopefully we will just move cities once more in the next decade, although who knows!), and spent the majority of the last decade with my current husband (who is currently sitting next to me watching a Disney movie while playing his Nintendo Switch, so the real question is, it is almost 2020 or almost 2010?)

I’m taking advantage of these last few years of relative freedom before going back to work. It’s crazy that I’ve really only had a handful of full years where I wasn’t in school in some way, and part of me is worried that I won’t know how to handle it! Especially if you add in kids and a house and other stuff like that this next decade. School has been a wonderful break, where I’m trying to make the most of it and take as many classes as I can, and undertake as many experiences as I want to make the most of it. Part of me is still worried about post-school financials, even though I already know that I’m returning to the same company. It’ll be interesting to see where M ends up, and how the glass ceiling will manifest itself for me – especially with potentially multiple maternity leaves and/or finding a job that isn’t as intense in the future to balance home life. But I still realize that I’m way lucky to be in my current situation, with most of the pieces already in place for me: my health (although, this year my real goal will be to get back in shape with all this extra time I have! Which will hopefully keep my PCOS in check), my ~love life~ (we’ll have a few years of marriage on our own before we even have kids, hooray!), my “bucket lists” (I’m pretty happy with how much we’ve traveled, and am perfectly content to go to 1-2 big trips a year once I return to work, instead of the 10000 trips I have now), and my financials (we’re holding off on buying a house until M finishes school so we can move to the city we want to settle down in!)

Anyway, this past fall we had a long weekend “off” (it wasn’t really time off, because we already have 3 day weekends with no class on Fridays, so this didn’t feel like too much time off) where we escaped New Haven and spent some time recovering in the mountains. There was a big MBA trip to Mexico City during this time, but I chose to forego that given that it sounded a bit too crazy for me and M couldn’t come, since he was in the middle of preparing for his qualifying exams (which he passed!) Instead, I had a cozy weekend with 14 other friends, in a cabin in the White Mountains. Most of the time the weather wasn’t great, so we spent most of the time cooking, playing board games and JackBox, and doing a few easy hikes/walks: Arethusa Falls (beautiful railroad tracks, although the rest of it was long and not that interesting), Artist’s Bluff (super easy 1 mile hike with nice views), Cannon Mountain (just took the tram up this time, although I’ve hiked this mountain before and it was pretty moderate if it’s dry). We had some international students on our trip, so it was cool sharing the experiences of building a fire/making s’mores/eating PB&J sandwiches and other “all-American” things.

Overall, it was a quick weekend to break up our semester into two “terms”. Next year, we’ll have a lot more flexibility in traveling as we’ll have all elective classes, and people will mostly have jobs by then! This winter break for example, many people are going on job treks or coming back to school early for interviews. Meanwhile, M and I will be in Colombia to ring in the new decade 🙂