On the first day of my hitchlead, I had cooked barbeque hot dogs with my mom’s homemade barbeque sauce and it was eaten up near the end of the evening. On the next meal, I made pasta with Sophie’s homemade tomato sauce. Sophie’s pasta kicks butt! The sauce was so thick that I used that to make sandwiches for my survey lunches.
On the 10th of July, I arranged my Mississippi team to do a trash clean up at Paradise Point, Sardis Lake. This place is one of the most popular places in Northern Mississippi that gets covered with trash because it gets overused. We all worked together to get the trash out of the beach and were able to make it look clean again. Once the trash was picked up, we separated some that would be recycled. Then we did some trash pickup at Outlet Channel. It was very tiring, there was a lot of trash, the weather was very hot, but we were all able to get this place cleaned up!
Then Alex Olsen (aka The Man God) came to visit us on the 10th to the 13th. He observed and interviewed each survey team the setup, member interaction, as well as our customer service. I really enjoyed listening to his adventure stories. One night, we played munchkin and he kicked our butts! Man, no one could beat The Man God!
Sophie, Keith, and I left Oxford to go to the Leave No Trace Behind training session that lasted from 7/15 to 7/19. We stayed at a campsite in Arkansas with about 20 participates with some new members. We learned about how we must dispose and clean up waste, leave objects and animals alone so people could get a chance to look at them, and not disturb any mosses and old soils otherwise it would take hundreds of years to grow back. Then after the sessions, we played volleyball, go hiking, ate smores, and learned very cool whistling tricks. Then we spent Thursday rowing kayaks and swimming three miles down a river. I got to take a lot of pictures, tried to row through the very shallow areas, jumping off a thick branch in the middle of the river, hang out with my buddies, and enjoyed the nice and warm water. That was our highlight of the LNTB week!
We will get a new member in a couple weeks. We will show him around the area where we live, where we work, and how we interact with each other and the customers. Hopefully, he will be very welcomed.
I really enjoyed hitchleading and I am hoping to do that again sometime later before the program is officially over!
