Hello All!
My name is Angela Lenhart. I am an adventure-loving Physical Therapist, and like so many other millennials; I’ve caught the travel bug! I was born and raised in Morgantown, West Virginia and moved to Washington in early August 2018 after accepting my first big-girl job in Yakima. Currently, when not living out of my car/tent/hotel, I live in Tri-Cities, WA and work a bit to the west in Prosser. WA.
Country Roads, Take Me Home…
I was born in Morgantown West Virginia in the early ’90s, growing up in a house that my dad, Danny, was ever expanding in his spare time. The property had a great yard scattered with plenty of hills, rocks, and trees to explore. My mom, Becki is a secretary-turned-teacher while my father was in the HVAC business. I also have two siblings back home in WV; a brother, DJ, who is a mechanical engineer, and a sister, Cassidy, an oncology nurse.
I moved through grade school with a love of learning and decided early on that physical therapy was the career for me. Most of my free time was spent dedicated to sports including basketball, softball, and volleyball. Despite lack of support from my high school softball coach, I pursued playing the sport in college and walked onto the team at West Virginia Wesleyan for my freshman year of undergrad. Several circumstances (including that I wasn’t really that great at softball) led me to transfer to West Virginia University and move back to Morgantown. I would stay at WVU to complete both my degrees: BS in Exercise Physiology and Doctorate of Physical Therapy.
A lot of my time growing up was spent outdoors, but rarely in the same ways that I do now. I was immersed in my team sports, especially as I got older, but also enjoyed walking in the woods near my childhood home, riding my horse with my best friend, Maya, and swimming in the lake by our family cabin. I don’t believe I thought much of traveling until I watched my sister begin to travel the world. While seeing her pictures definitely set the bait, it wasn’t until I took my first real travel adventure in New Zealand in the summer of 2013 that I was hooked!
Over the next few years, as I slowly began assembling my collection of gear from outdoor rec stores like REI, I began to even more slowly check things off my ever-expanding bucket list. I took a couple backpacking trips in the Appalachians of West Virginia and the Smokey Mountains of North Carolina/Tennessee. I also started hiking and kayaking/paddle boarding more locally. However, as I completed my degrees and continued to gain confidence and independence, the beautiful mountains that had surrounded me my whole life shrank more and more into hills. I could no longer ignore the small persistent voice in the back of my mind that was urging me on toward higher peaks.
Adventure Awaits…
I spent the final four months of my doctoral education working at an inpatient rehabilitation hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This provided me with the opportunity to move to a new city where I knew no-one; which in fact would serve as a very nice practice run for my unknown upcoming move to Washington state. I made some great friends in Pittsburgh (you’ll meet them in later posts) and gained a lot of confidence in myself as a clinician and an independent young woman.
So it was now time to determine where I wanted to start my career! In order to schedule my physical therapy board exam so that I could get licensed and begin working, I had to decide: in which state did I want to start?
At this point I was thinking I would purse a career as a travel physical therapist: I would work in one place for 3-6 months at a time and then move on to another assignment. The logistics of this were eventually decided to be unrealistic. I would be moving at that time with one snake and one cat (I have since acquired a second cat) and realized that it would be very difficult to find housing every 3 months. I eventually decided to accept a permanent physical therapist job in Yakima, WA.
My mother helped me move the 2500 miles (a much longer story for another time) across the country to the west coast. Several events pushed me to seek new career opportunities which led me to where I am now: living in Tri-Cities, working in Prosser, and loving living in Washington!
