With any luck, I've succeeded in my goal of making the climax of my travelogue feel completely anticlimactic. I present to you: the photos.
Completely unedited, unretouched, and with little to no regard for only selecting the good photos, please enjoy. I bet you can tell which hotel was the fancy one.
In a little less than eight hours, I will be taking the final exam of my undergraduate career. Then at noon, I'm getting on a plane to Colorado, and Friday morning I'll be graduating with a degree in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. To say that it's been a ridiculously long and, to a largely self-inflicted degree, tortuous journey, would not be an exaggeration. Huge thanks are due to all of my friends and my family, who have been incredibly supportive on this last leg. Seriously, the whole thing, with three different classes taken at three different schools, month-long furloughs to Boulder, late nights in a physics lab, studying, paper writing, and general college bureaucracy were all manageable simply because I know I have a wonderful, amazing cheering section just waiting to see me rock this.
It's funny -- a year and a half ago, I really didn't have any interest in my degree, but now that it's here? I can hardly wait to hear them call my name.
And if you're lucky, I might actually post pictures of me wearing my pointy graduation-hat before the turn of the next century.