Can't Seem To Stay Home

After being home for the first time in nearly a year for 5 days, I quickly left again to go to Minnesota for six weeks. I got back to North Carolina and stayed home for about 24 hours before leaving for nearly two weeks of non-stop traveling. Luckily, this time I didn't go too far from home.
The first trip I took was to the beach. I'm not a huge beach person, but every year my best friend and her family go to the beach and one way or another I usually end up tagging along. This year was no different.

After a couple of relaxing days at the beach, I went home for about 9 hours and got in the car the next morning to go to the mountains. We had a bit of a family reunion (with lots of nice food!).

And before we left the mountains, we stopped at Linville Gorge and Linville Falls. I'm surprised I hadn't been there before, because it was such a beautiful area!

After returning home from the mountains, I had almost 48 hours home before the next trip. I headed to DC, but this time for business rather than pleasure. I went to DC to apply for a Chinese visa (more on that later). I didn't have much time to walk around, but I did feel it was appropriate to get dinner in Chinatown and visit the National Mall.

I got home and one again had about a day until I left again. This time we were headed for the mountains again. We went to Damascus so we could ride on the Virginia Creeper Trail, which is a 34-mile bike trail made on an old railroad track.

On Sunday, my mom and I woke up early and did an 8-mile hike on the Appalachian Trail before we headed back home.

When I got home this time, it was for a while. I've been home now for over a week now without leaving town! I think this might only be because I got my wisdom teeth out this week and spent most of the week catching up on sleep. 

I haven't got too many plans for the rest of the summer, except for preparing to go to China in September. I'm cooking up some big plans and I'm getting really excited now. Hopefully I'll write a whole blog post about it before I leave.