Hello everyone! You have made it to Nikki and Colter’s travel blog! We will be updating this blog on a weekly basis while we are on our South American trip. We hope to include many of our pictures and stories so everyone can keep up with what we are doing. We will also try to alternate who writes the blogs.

Currently we are scrambling to get everything done before we leave on our trip on October 10th. Nikki is deciding on what PhD programs to apply to and I am focusing on getting our truck and camper ready for the trip. Nikki’s top programs are all focused on policy from an engineering standpoint. She is interested in an engineering degree that utilizes her technical background for policy making from Carnegie Mellon, a policy degree from Harvard that focuses in international development or a degree in public affairs with an emphasis in science, technology and environmental policy from Princeton. While deciding on her future school, Nikki is also working on publishing her 7^th and 8^th papers, which will be her first papers with Ritsch as her last name! She has so many great opportunities ahead of her and I am excited to see which one she pursues.

I have recently readjusted my career path by decided to focus on groundwater modeling and remediation instead of fluid mechanics. For the last half of my undergraduate degree and for the majority of my Masters, I focused my classes on groundwater modeling. It wasn’t until my groundwater research fell through that I looked into fluid mechanics. I loved my research in fluid mechanics, but I also still have a love for groundwater, I know I am a nerd :). Recently, I spent some time looking into careers in both groundwater and fluid mechanics and overall, I was much more excited about the prospects of a groundwater career. Because of this I have decided to either forgo or just postpone a PhD. I don’t believe I need a PhD for a career in groundwater modeling and if I end up wanting to continue my education, a couple of years of industry experience will really help. So, for now it is just Nikki working like crazy to apply for schools and scholarships while I have a bit more time and freedom now to prepare for our trip.

In terms of preparing for our trip, we are getting close and closer to being ready! We have equipped our camper with all the space-saving, organizational solutions we could. We have Velcro-ed all sorts of boxes and pockets to every vertical surface to store everything from our toiletries to our cooking utensils. We love the space we have created and can easily see ourselves living in it for the next year! We are now trying to do the same kind of organizational black magic for the backseat of our truck. We have spent tens of hours planning our new living space and we are more than happy with the results so far!

We have also been working on our route planning! We now have a rough idea of where we will be at what time of the year. First, we decided to flip the trip on its head and travel from south to north. Originally, we had planned to start in Colombia and travel south to the tip of Chile, but we did some research on the best times to be in each country and found it was much better to travel from south to north. So now we will ship our truck/camper from Houston to Montevideo, Uruguay. This way we are able to be in Patagonia during their summer and follow the dry season up the continent. With this new route in mind, we planned our rough timeline, seen below:

We think this new route is much better than we originally thought but the only downside is that we will not be able to ski in Chile. Instead, we will focus more on learning to surf and backpacking since the weather will be nicer throughout the trip.

We want to thank everyone for your support on our trip and we hope you enjoy following our blog as we take our trip of a lifetime!

Lots of love,
Nikki and Colter