Epilogue: The Longest Summer

Baltimore, Maryland

Evening Walk - Steinheim, Germany
Iride a school bus every morning now. Again. A big yellow one. With green vinyl seats you peel yourself off of in hot weather. With the fold-out STOP sign. With the flashing lights. With the windows that only slide halfway down, enough to only tease riders about relief from the stifling environs. But my lunch hasn’t been stolen (yet), so things are still good.

After an amazing summer of roaming and eating and photographing and eating, it’s time to get back to the real world.

I’m in Baltimore, Maryland now and the blocky yellow school bus is the free shuttle that saves me from driving my car every day to my new Ph.D. program at Johns Hopkins University. I’m commuting to the hospital, in a location on the edge of civilization in a city that has seven times more murders than the US national average. You have to be number one in something, I guess. My Welcome Kit didn’t include a bulletproof vest, but at least the trauma section of the hospital is top shelf.

After an amazing summer of roaming and eating and photographing and eating, it’s time to get back to the real world. And with that harsh reality of school and classes and research and hospitals and having my car towed (only once so far).

For those of you who tuned into my summer travel emails, the photos are in progress — 2800 shots will take me some time to process.

So that’s it from me, because it’s hard to type while ducking to avoid gunfire.