Greetings from your favorite Minnesoooootan Miss Bia Wia! I had the lovely task of being the fifth Hitch Leader. Boy the season has flown by so fast! Nineteen more days until I will be taking off to the not-so-exciting city of Fargo North Dakota for school. GO BISON! 😉 Before I begin talking about the last couple of weeks, let me just say I love our team, and I think all of us have great chemistry and get along fairly well. It has been a pleasure getting to know everyone on our team and in the program. So many new friendships have blossomed from this experience, and I am glad I got to be a part of this experience. The day after my hitch started, we switched teams. Thank you Erica and Alison for coming to save the day, you’re a great addition to the team! I was on Team B since the beginning and when we finally switched, I moved to Team C and was paired with Mike. Alison and Darrel took Team B and Erica and Roy took Team A.
One little adventure me and Erica had during my time as Hitch Leader was Cliff diving! Okay, you don’t actually dive off the cliff, but you do jump off of it. It was really fun! Took us a while to actually find a spot and it wasn’t even the one we set out looking for. But, we figured it would have to do since we had been searching for two hours and it was still very fun. While we were there, we found a really cool snake skin and some kind of foot.. We had no idea what it belonged to and quite honestly it was pretty gross so I did not attach the photo. All in all, it was a fun experience and I will definitely be doing it again in the future.
Ever since Erica arrived, me and her have been doing a lot of grocery shopping. We find it fun! A few days ago Erica baked us a very delicious Herbal flat bread, and about 3 dozen chocolate chip cookies, along with an apple pie. What can I say, the girl loves to bake. Alison likes to cook as well. She recently cooked everyone Jambalaya and she even made a special one for me since I’m a vegetarian. Let’s just say both girls know how to cook. I haven’t really cooked in the past, but I have been recently and I and starting to fall in love with it. At least I’ll go home knowing some good recipes that I can use throughout the school year!
We actually had some pretty cool conservation projects this time around. On July 25th we got to go on a decommissioned Navy Vessel called the R/V Eastern Surveyor. It was a really fun day! We got to learn the basics of what it takes to work a vessel that size. For example, the order of the lines when they need to tie up the vessel to a dock, or release the lines before taking off down the River, Lake, what have you. We also did another project on the Vessel the following week but I will talk about that in a little bit. On July 29th, we had a project set up with one of the Rangers Allen Earhart to pick up trash on Army Corps property that got washed up on shore from a flood back in 2010. We found some pretty interesting things while we were there. It ranged from the typical garbage like plastic bottles to basketballs to shoes to a wooden statue of Bugs Bunny. I mean, that was kind of cool. Who didn’t love Bugs Bunny when they were younger? I know I did!
A few days later on August 2nd, we went out on the Vessel again and actually did some surveys of one area. We split up into three groups of two and documented the vegetation in the area, animals, how many there were that we could see, etc. We also took pictures of everything which we then gave to the Captain. One of the more exciting projects we have done throughout the season, that’s for sure. Mike and I also went to see the Georgia team last week! Mike, Clayton, Bud, and Sophie went to go see a show in Atlanta and the next day Bud and I went to the Atlanta Zoo! I was really looking forward to it because I found out they had pandas there, and I had never seen a Panda before. We had a really fun day at the zoo, even though it was raining. We got 50% off the original ticket price because of the weather so take home message: Go to the Zoo when it’s raining. J Man I could just keep going and going and going but I’m sure I have written quite enough for everyone to read. Time for this kid to go make some hot chocolate.
Toodles,
Bianca Annette Moravec
