On the road again. . .
Yes, my heart was broken thursday night, but i am glad they can't hurt me by blowing anymore games this season. That is all I am going to say about this. "I'm moving on . . ."
Tomorrow morning I leave for my five day journey down to Louisiana. I am excited to see the country, but I am not as excited about riding with my team for that long. We got downsized in the van department too, so we only have a 12 passenger van. Very sad. The 12p isn't anywhere near as much fun to drive. Good news though . . . i will have an opportunity to drive the big Uhal!!! That just screams fun, especially if we get to pick our passenger from another team. I think we have to stick with our team though. Oh well!
This past week was definitly NOT what i had imagined it would be, in terms of relaxing. Our portfolio, which is about a 20+ page document each team compiles about their project, was due tuesday, so we were working on that till then. We include things like the history of the community we were living in, details about what our team did, pluses about the project, constructive "even better if's", reflections, etc. Then we had to plan our debriefing, which is a verbalization of a mini version of the portfolio. Thursday we had our briefing for our next project, which i was in charge of making sure everyone got their stuff together for it. I had a problem with one girl on my team, not understanding this is not a joke and not doing her work, but hopefully that won't happen again.
Other than all the work we had to do, and meetings, i did have a great time hanging out with my friends that were back on campus. I am sitting here trying to think of specific things we did, non americorps related, and it's really hard to do. I think my brain is just super fried right now from the packing/cleaning blitz that went on today. We hung out a lot, just talking about our last projects, and other things like Harry Potter (and how much we all love it - # 7 in JULY!!) and music (i'm introducing country to people, who are introducing me to other music), of course March Madness, and all kinds of super cool things. It is because of these things, and many more that I love people here! They are all just as cool as I am!
On Friday 7 of the teams flew down to the gulf, leaving the other 4 of us who are driving down. Those of us here did local projects on Friday. My team gave out smoke detectors to an elderly community trailer park, as a part of a program the Fire Department is doing called Operation Smoke Detector (original i know). They have targeted key communities that they feel are subject to fires, or might not have working detectors. We were done by lunch, but it was fun. I like older people. We pretty much just asked if they had working ones in their homes, and if not we offered to give them the ones we had, and even install them. Don't worry, i wasn't playing with electricity, we used the simple battery ones.
Arriving back on campus Friday was depressing, because all the teams were gone. My room was especially lonely without Heather there! I now know how she felt when I left and there were only 4 teams left on campus for the first project. The flights they were on were all crazy. Some teams were split up on different flights, and they all were on like 5 or 6 flights. The flight that some of my friends were on had a layover in Washington DC. They have had an exciting weekend because their flight was delayed till Monday morning (tomorrow) because of the snow storm in the Northeast. The kicker for them was they couldn't get their luggage, and they were wearing their uniform (cargo shorts, and their gray tshirt). Most of them had to go buy some pants/hoodie so they could sight see over the weekend. I am hoping my week of traveling isn't quite as exciting as theirs. . .although I wouldn't have minded being stuck in D.C. Its been a few years since I visited, but its a cool place.
Today, in between my insane packing/cleaning hours, I got out of Sacramento for a while. We have some old friends of the family, the Gregors, they used to live in Durham when i was younger, who live a little bit outside of Sac. They came and picked me up, and took me up north east of here to Nevada City, and the Empire State Gold Mine National Park. Nevada city was a quaint old little town that reminded me a lot of Boone with the mountains/hills all around and old shops. We had some really good Mexican food as well, which ya'll know i really enjoy. The Gold Mine we visited was cool, it's a national park now, so it has been preserved pretty well. I really enjoyed getting out of here for a bit, and seeing some of the beautiful foothills/rolling hills that are in northern california. I also enjoyed seeing old friends, familiar faces, even if it has been quite a few years since we saw each other!
We have to be up at 6am, so I am going to go crash in my almost empty room (sigh). I'll update this hopefully next weekend when I arrive in Lafayette! I should have some interesting stories after riding in a van for 5 days. I have some books, my crochet, letters, and many more things to entertain me on our journey.
Hope ya'll have a wonderful week!
Tomorrow morning I leave for my five day journey down to Louisiana. I am excited to see the country, but I am not as excited about riding with my team for that long. We got downsized in the van department too, so we only have a 12 passenger van. Very sad. The 12p isn't anywhere near as much fun to drive. Good news though . . . i will have an opportunity to drive the big Uhal!!! That just screams fun, especially if we get to pick our passenger from another team. I think we have to stick with our team though. Oh well!
This past week was definitly NOT what i had imagined it would be, in terms of relaxing. Our portfolio, which is about a 20+ page document each team compiles about their project, was due tuesday, so we were working on that till then. We include things like the history of the community we were living in, details about what our team did, pluses about the project, constructive "even better if's", reflections, etc. Then we had to plan our debriefing, which is a verbalization of a mini version of the portfolio. Thursday we had our briefing for our next project, which i was in charge of making sure everyone got their stuff together for it. I had a problem with one girl on my team, not understanding this is not a joke and not doing her work, but hopefully that won't happen again.
Other than all the work we had to do, and meetings, i did have a great time hanging out with my friends that were back on campus. I am sitting here trying to think of specific things we did, non americorps related, and it's really hard to do. I think my brain is just super fried right now from the packing/cleaning blitz that went on today. We hung out a lot, just talking about our last projects, and other things like Harry Potter (and how much we all love it - # 7 in JULY!!) and music (i'm introducing country to people, who are introducing me to other music), of course March Madness, and all kinds of super cool things. It is because of these things, and many more that I love people here! They are all just as cool as I am!
On Friday 7 of the teams flew down to the gulf, leaving the other 4 of us who are driving down. Those of us here did local projects on Friday. My team gave out smoke detectors to an elderly community trailer park, as a part of a program the Fire Department is doing called Operation Smoke Detector (original i know). They have targeted key communities that they feel are subject to fires, or might not have working detectors. We were done by lunch, but it was fun. I like older people. We pretty much just asked if they had working ones in their homes, and if not we offered to give them the ones we had, and even install them. Don't worry, i wasn't playing with electricity, we used the simple battery ones.
Arriving back on campus Friday was depressing, because all the teams were gone. My room was especially lonely without Heather there! I now know how she felt when I left and there were only 4 teams left on campus for the first project. The flights they were on were all crazy. Some teams were split up on different flights, and they all were on like 5 or 6 flights. The flight that some of my friends were on had a layover in Washington DC. They have had an exciting weekend because their flight was delayed till Monday morning (tomorrow) because of the snow storm in the Northeast. The kicker for them was they couldn't get their luggage, and they were wearing their uniform (cargo shorts, and their gray tshirt). Most of them had to go buy some pants/hoodie so they could sight see over the weekend. I am hoping my week of traveling isn't quite as exciting as theirs. . .although I wouldn't have minded being stuck in D.C. Its been a few years since I visited, but its a cool place.
Today, in between my insane packing/cleaning hours, I got out of Sacramento for a while. We have some old friends of the family, the Gregors, they used to live in Durham when i was younger, who live a little bit outside of Sac. They came and picked me up, and took me up north east of here to Nevada City, and the Empire State Gold Mine National Park. Nevada city was a quaint old little town that reminded me a lot of Boone with the mountains/hills all around and old shops. We had some really good Mexican food as well, which ya'll know i really enjoy. The Gold Mine we visited was cool, it's a national park now, so it has been preserved pretty well. I really enjoyed getting out of here for a bit, and seeing some of the beautiful foothills/rolling hills that are in northern california. I also enjoyed seeing old friends, familiar faces, even if it has been quite a few years since we saw each other!
We have to be up at 6am, so I am going to go crash in my almost empty room (sigh). I'll update this hopefully next weekend when I arrive in Lafayette! I should have some interesting stories after riding in a van for 5 days. I have some books, my crochet, letters, and many more things to entertain me on our journey.
Hope ya'll have a wonderful week!
posted by Sarah @ 11:02 PM
1 Comments:
At 7:44 PM ,
Anonymous said...
I'm sorry you are kind of miserable traveling allllllll that way... but it WILL be worth it! Love ya, miss ya!
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