Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Middle Ground.

I am Caroline and welcome to my very first ever solo episode.

Guys, I am all things nervous and excited.

This episode is going to be revolving around all

things my gap year that I took in 2018. And it's something that I'm so, so passionate about.

And I just thoroughly love talking about it. And so I think this is going to be a really good one.

So without further ado, I'm going to share my grounding moment.

My grounding moment from this week is that my birthday is coming up.

It's September 15th and I will be 21.

Woohoo.

And I didn't know what to do for my birthday this year because of COVID and I usually do things like travel outside the country

or go on a trip. I'm all about experiencing things on my birthday instead of gifts. And this year,

you know, after digging and digging, um, I decided I just wanted my family and my boyfriend

to come with me somewhere and collectively we all decided to go to

Heltsburg, California, which is in Sonoma Valley County, and it is wine country. We booked a little

Airbnb. We're just going to relax. It's a really, really small town, and it's far away from people.

That was my one request. I was like, because of COVID, you know, I want something that's

really out there and just different. So we decided on that, and I'm really excited. I haven't been

on a plane since January, which if you know me personally, or if you stalked me,

that's insane. I used to go on planes like four times in a month. Really, seriously, I did. So yeah,

I'm just really excited to travel again, and I'm just so thankful that my family and my boyfriend

get to celebrate me with me.

...