As I’ve said before, hubs and I try to take a short trip after every block. At our school we only have finals so that really adds a lot of stress to each set of exams since our entire grade rides on that. With all the stress of trying to figure out my new schedule for boards and remediation, I didn’t get to plan anything in advance. Last minute, we decided to have an overnight stay-cation in downtown Los Angeles. Then we realized that we’re not hip enough to hang out there and then decided to go to Pasadena instead.

Because it was so last minute, all the hotels were going to be really expensive so we decided to try out Airbnb. I’ll hopefully have another post separately on advice on using Airbnb in the next few weeks.

I’ve been living in California for well over a decade but still haven’t really explored all the touristy spots in SoCal. Because we wanted to stay local for our trip, we decided to go to Pasadena and check out places around there. Our first stop was The Huntington. I’ve included some photos below from my ‘real’ camera.

It’s been really warm here (getting up into the 90s) so it was the perfect day for walking around the gardens. The Japanese Garden was definitely my favorite! We were bummed that they close so early but it was still nice to spend some time outdoors after being cooped up and studying for finals.

We checked into our cottage and then head out to Old Town Pasadena and spent the night doing some shopping and grabbing dinner. We ended up walking about 6 -7 miles the whole day, which was a nice change of pace from being in school.

We started our last block of medical school this morning with a marathon of six lectures on nephrology. There’s a lot riding on this one for me because if I fail this block I’ll have to repeat second year. I had a meeting earlier today to figure out my schedule for remediation, boards and starting third year and feel a lot calmer and more confident about everything. Everyone’s journey to get to where they want to be is different and I don’t mind taking the beaten path if it means I’ll be more prepared for caring for my patients in the future. It’s taken a lot of time, conversations with my therapist and journaling for me to get to this place but I’m here and ready to move forward.