That's all folks

Well, I guess this is it.  I've been home for a little more than a week now.  What a semester it was.  So very busy, but so incredible that the go-go-go aspect seemed to fade into the background.  I made amazing new friends this semester and shared with them experiences that will most certainly last a lifetime.  They're more than friends, they're shipmates.  It's a select bunch, Williams-Mystic, but an amazing one.  It's interesting what you miss when it's not there anymore.  Like the random conversations with your roommate at 1:30 in the morning, or someone just popping by the house to say hi, or seeing one of your professors riding by on his bicycle telling you to stay out of traffic.  All in all, it's been a semester that I will remember for the rest of my life and everything I've learned will stay with me for a long time.  Most of which I will probably bore you with at some point ;)


Cheers.

Clackity-Clack

Onomatopoeias aside, I now possess my very own sets of bones!  These are the greatest instruments ever.  They are wicked portable and are louder than you'd think for being so small.  Tim scrimshawed my initials in letters as well as in signal flags on the bones.  They are actual bone versus being made from wood (although not whale bone, as it is illegal to use whale products in the  States).  I've been borrowing a pair of Don's for the semester, but now that I've got my own, I have a new way of annoying my younger sister! Just kidding, Cameron.  All joking aside, these are the coolest instruments ever and people that are wicked good at them and have been playing for years can make them do SO many cool things, like play different pitches and rhythms.  I'm still learning, but I can play with a set in each hand now!  But I should probably stop geeking out over bones and get back to writing the many papers that are due in the next two weeks... 

The White Whale, That Great Behemoth of the Sea: Moby Dick

Last night was our Moby in the Belly of Labaree performance.  This performance basically consists of staged readings of "Moby-Dick".  We had a very wide variety of choices from the very first chapter, beginning with "Call me Ishmael," to the final chapters of the chase.  Steffi and I chose to do some chanteys straight from the book for the performance, as my acting skills leave much to be desired and I was busy doing stage manager things anyway.  We had a very creative white whale costume, constructed by a Williams-Mystic student a few years ago.  What a great costume.  It definitely added to the silliness of some of the chapters.  Everyone had some sort of costume or theatrical element for their scene.  We even had two of my housemates do a scene with Queequeg and Ishmael as Bert and Ernie.  Hilarious! All in all, it was definitely a success and was a wonderful way to finish up "Moby-Dick".


Other things I've learned about Moby-Dick since reading it: the title of the book is hyphenated whereas the name of the whale is not; Melville is obsessed with Shakespeare, like seriously obsessed (Captain Ahab is essentially King Lear or some other classic tragic hero); Melville also borrows shamelessly from other authors and books, like Willy Shakes, the Bible, Chase's narrative of the sinking of the Essex, among other things.  Interesting tidbits I did not know.  But now "Moby-Dick" is done and we're on to the next book, "Country of the Pointed Firs." At some point, I'll post the reading list for this semester.  It's been a very all-encompassing look at maritime literature and most of the books we've read have been thoroughly enjoyable.

Gators and Oil and Snakes, oh my!

Well, I'm back from Louisiana safe and sound and what a trip it was.  We did everything from a swamp tour to look for gators to digging for oil on the beach in Grand Isle.  

Welcome to the South.

As seems to be the pattern with these field seminars, we got up bright and early (4am) on the morning of October 26 to head to the airport for our flight to Louisiana.  We touched down in New Orleans about 11am CT.  Our first stop was the levee across from the Ormand Plantation.  We had class sitting right there on the levee looking at all the ships go by on the Mississippi.  What a way to start the trip.  After class, we walked back over to the plantation and got to see some of the huge live oaks on the property.  Our next stop was Zam's for a swamp tour!  Of course, before we even get on the boat, they had pythons out for us to hold.  That was awesome.  We hopped on to the boat and made our way out to look for gators.  We found a few gators and spotted a turtle or two.

 When we got back from the tour, we got a chance to hold baby gators, and young 3-foot and 4-foot gators.  And an 8 foot python. Wicked sweet.

We finally arrived in Cocodrie at LUMCON (Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium), where we were staying for our entire trip.  Glenn gave us a two-step lesson in preparation for the dance the following night.  It was a lot of fun.


The next day (October 27) began with a lecture on the history and geology of the Mississippi.  Really nifty because apparently the mouth of the Mississippi has moved around a lot in the last few thousand years and it wants to move again now, but we're keeping it where it is so we can continue to use it for commerce.  After the lecture, we all suited up for a canoe trip into the marsh.  We found a good spot to go "ashore", got up to ramming speed and were able to pull the canoes up onto the reeds.  We tromped around the marsh for a bit and played with some of the snails.  We had some sinkage issues with a few people, which was highly comical.  We also probed the marsh to see how deep we could go.  We were able to push the probe to about 15 meters, which represents about a 3000 year old marsh (1 meter down is about 500 years old).  We tried the same in Barn Island Marsh right down the road from Mystic and only made it in about a foot or so.  Quite the difference.  We finished up by looking at some oysters and then headed back to the dock.  After lecture, we got a chance to watch a shrimping operation just down the road from LUMCON.  We watched the shrimp offloaded from the boat and into a large basin, then onto a conveyor belt and into large boxes with ice to be shipped out.

The process was interesting, but boy did it smell, especially the batch that had gone bad. Yikes. We were able to ask the woman who owned the operation a bunch of question about how the oil spill had affected her and how Katrina had affected her.  It was fascinating.  She's a wholesaler.  She buys the shrimp from the shrimpers and then ships the shrimp in large icebox trucks.  She buys mostly from foreign shrimpers who come for the season.  Most of the local fishermen are working for BP now.  After that, we went back to LUMCON for the rest of our lectures.  That night was dancing!  We went to a traditional dance hall, the Jolly Inn, in Louisiana and spent the night dancing the two-step and the waltz with each other and some of the locals.  It was so much fun.


We spent October 28 on Grand Isle.  That was quite the day.  We started in Port Fourchon, a very significant seaport in the oil industry.  Half of the drilling activity in the Gulf and 75% of all deepwater production is supported out of Port Fourchon.  The port was almost dead when we were there.  Usually, there are around 1200 trucks coming into and going out of Port Fourchon every day, but since the oil spill, it's been pretty much dead.  From Port Fourchon, we headed on to Grand Isle.  We spend the day with Chris Hernandez, one of the officials on the island as well as a jack-of-all-trades type.  He was utterly captivating.  What a storyteller.  He introduced us to Mayor David Carmodel and the BP liaison, "Moose", who is also coaching the basketball team at the high school.  

From left to right: Chris Hernandez, Mayor David Carmodel, Moose

Both David and Chris shared their experiences during Katrina and their thoughts on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.  David was talking about how he and Chris are usually the last ones off the island when there's a storm or an order of evacuation.  He said that during Katrina, he was leaving the island and was almost halfway over the bridge when he remembered the homeless man.  He told the driver to turn around so he could go back.  The driver hesitated and David told him, "I don't leave anyone behind."  So back they went.  David waded across the island in waist-high, sometimes chest-high water until he found the homeless man and brought him off the island with them.  He put him into a hotel in northern Louisiana and paid for him to stay for a few nights.  A few weeks later, David remembered the homeless man.  He'd been a little distracted, so he called the hotel and asked about him.  They told him that he'd done such a good job cheering up the residents that they hired him as a janitor, but that David had accrued thousands of dollars in hotel bills due to paying for him to stay in the room.  David was so happy that the homeless man had a job and was safe that he didn't mind paying the money out of pocket.  David also told us a short tidbit about dolphins.  If you see dolphins hitting their tails on the water, there's a storm coming, maybe not immediately, but it's on its way.  The folks on Grand Isle have learned to read their surroundings after all these years of experience.  Chris also shared his experiences during Katrina.  He told us that during Katrina, he called up David and asked him what David wanted him to do.  If David needed him to stay, he would, but he needed to get his family out.  David told him to go with his family, but Chris refused to leave without him.  The way Chris talk, you can't help but listen.  He puts his whole body and soul into recounting even what he does on the island during Christmastime (he dresses up as Santa and goes around giving out candy canes to all the small children on the island).  Chris also opened up his home to us and shared more of his Katrina experiences right there in his basement.  He told us that he is usually one of the last to leave the island and one of the first to return.  He returned after Katrina and after checking the rest of the island, he made his way home to check on his house.  It was still there, but when he checked on his father-in-law's house and his son's house right near his, they were both gone, not a trace left.  It was a very emotional story, even 5 years later.  He explained that he had to be the one to return to his family and tell his father-in-law that there was nothing left.  He said it was one of the hardest things he's ever had to do.  Once his family returned to the island, they went through the wreckage of his father-in-law's house to see if they could find anything.  Amongst the things that they could salvage was a large pot that had been the family for a few generations.  They cleaned the sand out and still use it to this day.  Before going to Louisiana, I could never understand why people would want to live in a place that constantly gets hammered by hurricanes.  It didn't make any sense to me, but now I get it.  It's just the way of life and it's a community of people that support one another and help each other survive.  You build, it gets destroyed, and you rebuild, but you don't lose your community.  Chris also told us everything that's been happening in regards to the oil spill.  He says it's a huge cover up operation, that people working for BP can't say anything, even to their spouses, or they will be fired.  He took us to one of the beaches so we could dig to see if there was still oil.  Unfortunately we were successful.

We didn't have to go very deep at all before we found oil-stained sand.  How depressing, especially since this beach has already been cleaned, supposedly.  After spending the rest of the day on Grand Isle, we headed back to LUMCON for our blue crab dinner!! Win!  Their way of cooking blue crabs was totally different than what I'm used to.  I'm used to getting thoroughly messy due to the Old Bay covering the crabs on the outside.  The crabs we ate were cooked with the spices in the water, so no mess on the outside, just flavor on the inside.  So good.

We left early enough on October 29 to watch the sunrise as we were driving to New Orleans for our last day.  We had a walking tour of New Orleans, led by Glenn, where we saw St. Louis Cathedral, the Cabildo, William Faulkner's House, Tennessee Williams' House, various types of traditional architecture, the Preservation Hall (a very famous jazz hall), and, of course, Bourbon Street.  We had some free time to explore Bourbon Street.  It was...interesting to say the least. After Bourbon Street, we boarded the Natchez for our tour of the Mississippi River via paddle steamer.  

It was really fascinating.  We got to see and learn about a lot of the industry that is based out of the Mississippi River and the types of boats that travel up and down it every day.  We also got a chance to explore the engine room of the Natchez.  Huge and very cool.  Natchez was the final excursion for the day before heading to the airport to return home to Mystic.  Louisiana was quite the trip.  Not as fast paced as California and much heavier on the emotion side of things, but still a very worthwhile trip.  What a learning experience. 

An East Coast Girl Travels West

     Phew. What a trip.  Before this semester, I'd never been to California before, so that was amazing. We started off our ten-day trip very, very early in the morning (leaving Mystic at 5am, getting up around 4:15/4:30).  By the time we touched down in California it was already 12:30 PST. We began our journal through California with our 5-van caravan.  The program rented 5 minivans that became our traveling home for the week. We communicated between these vans for directions, witty banter, and interesting educational tidbits with walkie-talkies. Definitely an experience!  On our way to our first stop we drove across the San Andreas Fault, which had filled in with water, so it was essentially like driving over a river.  If you look on a map of the San Andreas fault region, you can tell where the fault is because this river is so straight.  That usually indicates some sort of geological activity.  Once passing over the Fault from the North American plate to the Pacific plate, we continued on and hit massive amounts of traffic. Now where in the world could this traffic be coming from?  Pumpkin season.  No, I am not kidding. The reason we hit so much traffic was because pumpkin season had just started and everyone was heading to the pumpkin patches to pick their pumpkins for the season. We finally drove through what Glenn called the "pumpgasm" or pumpkin picking central.  Pumpkin patch after pumpkin patch after pumpkin patch.  It was amazing how much the traffic essentially disappeared once we passed by all the pumpkin farms.  We finally made it to San Gregorio Beach, which was our first stop, but we had to get back in the vans and continue on because the beach wasn't accessible due to high tide.  So we drove about a mile down the road to Pompinio Beach.  So different than Atlantic coastline or at least what I've seen of the Atlantic coastline.

We had some time to explore the beach before our lecture. We had class on the beach.  How cool is that? Jim talked to us a little bit about the different types of flora and fauna we will see on the duration of this trip: like sea palms and crabs. After that, we headed back to the vans and made our way to our hotel for the night.

     Day 2, October 3, brought us to Old Monterey.  We passed Pigeon Point Lighthouse on the way, which is one of the most commonly photographed lighthouses in the US.  We also stopped at Moss Landing Harbor to see the sea lions! There were so many all just piled on the dock.  There were also otters swimming around a little ways off. So so cute!!  Moss Landing is an active fishing port, fishing offshore for rockfish, etc.  From Moss Landing, we headed on to Old Monterey, also known as the Monterey State Historic Park.  We were supposed to go to the Maritime Museum but we discovered it is closed until next year upon arrival, so we went to the Pacific House Museum instead.  The Pacific House was constructed from adobe in 1847 and contained the history of the Indian people who lived in the area before it was taken over by the Spanish, Mexicans, and Americans (not all at the same time of course).  We had a chance to explore the museum a bit before Glenn took us on a walking tour of Old Monterey.  There was a whole section on otter hunting due to the value of the fur.  There were also varying exhibits on cooking implements, tools, musical instruments and much more. From there, Glenn took us on a walking tour.  Our first stop was the Casa del Oro.  It was originally an adobe barracks for the Mexican troops, but it got turned into a store to sell to those participating in the gold rush.  Our next stop was California's first theater! 

It originally operated as a store, but the store closed when the owner went looking for gold during the gold rush.  The American soldiers in town turned it into a theater to make money.  Jack Swan built the stage and provided benches, whale-oil lamps, candles for footlights, and curtains made of blankets.  From there we passed by the first brick house.  Most buildings from this era were made from adobe.  The bricks were actually locally made, but they didn't realize the sand needed to be washed to get all the salt water out of it, so the building has started to deteriorate.  The next place was really cool: the whaling station which was the headquarters of the Old Monterey Whaling Company.  The coolest part of this was the sidewalk right outside. Sounds boring, but the sidewalk was made out of whale vertebrae! Awesome, right?  Our last stop was the Monterey Customs House, for which Cary gave us the low down.  Turns out, the Customs House was actually built in three sections: the first by the Spanish, the second by the Mexicans, and the third by the Americans.  It was right in front of the Customs House where the Americans declared California as part of the United States.  And that basically concluded our walking tour of the Monterey State Historic Park.  That was only the first half of the day.  For the second half of the day, we got aboard the Pt. Sur Clipper for our whale watch.  Once we headed out past the copious amount of sea lions in the harbor, we made our way into the Pacific Ocean.  The first thing we saw were two orcas "playing" with a harbor seal before eating it. Apparently that is very rare to see.  The guys running the whale watch had never seen one and they've been doing it for 15 or so years.  After the orcasphalaropes (birds) in the distance.  These birds eat the same thing as humpback whales.  So where these birds are found, usually so are humpbacks. And boy did we find humpbacks.  They were literally surrounding us, enough that we turned off the engine and just floated while they came up to inspect the boat, sound beneath it, and bounce sonar off of it.  It was absolutely incredible.
     October 4, Day 3, was a day spent in Monterey itself for the most part.  We started off the day with a walking tour of Monterey.  We stopped by the statue of Ed Ricketts, which was placed almost directly at the site of his death.  We walked by the remnants of the old canneries, which shut down when the sardine population crashed.  We also saw Ed Ricketts' house/lab as well as some of the other buildings fictionalized for Steinbeck's "Cannary Row." After that, we hit the aquarium.  I am totally obsessed with the Monterey Bay Aquarium.  It is spectacular!!!  Unfortunately we only had two hours to explore, but we made the best of it!  There was a sea horse exhibit, a coral reef exhibit, a jellyfish exhibit, a kelp forest exhibit, a deep coral reef exhibit, as well as a touch tank, a shore birds exhibit and a sea otter exhibit.  The jellyfish were absolutely gorgeous!! I have never seen so many different types of jellyfish, or sea horses for that matter.  Amazing.  The coolest thing about this aquarium is that it's not your typical aquarium.  All the exhibits are based on the local ecosystems and helping to protect and preserve them.  It's fascinating.  But I think the best thing about the aquarium was the sea otters. There were two in the tank, a baby and its surrogate mother.  So cute!!  For the second half of the day, we headed to Point Lobos.  It was utterly stunning.  We sat on a cliff overlooking the waves crashing on the rocks and had class. How many people can say they've had class on a cliff in California?  Williams-Mystic students can!!  Anyway, once class was over, we had a bit of time to explore. Sonja and I found trees to climb. That night was also a most epic occurrence. The program treated us to Ghiradelli's ice cream, which was unbelievably tasty, so some students decided to have an Earthquake Challenge contest.  The Earthquake is 8 scoops of ice cream and 8 toppings of your choice.  Each team had 4 people: 3 students and one faculty/staff.  The time began and all hell broke loose.  Team Banana dove right in and started eating with their hands.  It was totally out of control and the most hysterical thing ever and a fantastic way to end the day.
     Day 4, October 5, was an early, packed day. We made our way to San Francisco, but stopped in the Port of Oakland on our way there.  We boarded the Crowley tugboat "Guard." Crowley Maritime is one of the BIG maritime corporations in the world and gives money to Williams-Mystic to help students (like me!) attend the program! The tug can move in so many different directions and it has two large fire hoses to assist in firefighting if need be. 

Our next stop of the day was the Marin Headlands overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.  What a view. Beyond gorgeous.  While stopped at the Headlands, we had our lectures for the day in the shadow of the Golden Gate.  How crazy is that? Pretty cool.  Once all that was done, we headed over the bridge itself into San Francisco.  We had the night free to explore the city.  Steffi, Sonja and I found an out of the way Indian restaurant for dinner, which was really tasty.  Naan, yummm.  We explored around a little bit more and then took a cable car home :) Excellenttttt.
     October 6, Day 5, began with a sail around San Francisco Bay on the historic vessel, Alma.  The Alma is a scow schooner which essentially functioned as a flatbed truck.  She ferried goods from ships to port.  She would have been piled high with non-perishable food/products, like hay, grain, lumber, etc.  Because of this, she is built very wide and flat and has a centerboard instead of a keel to allow her into the shallow areas in and around the delta.  She was often piled so high that the sails would have to be reefed up to the first reef point instead of down to it.  We were in the middle of learning about the history of the scow schooner when one of the mates spied a man overboard a little ways away.  So we radioed the Coast Guard and turned on the motor to help him.  The first thing he said when we asked if he wanted a life ring was "Do you have any Grey Poupon?" I wonder how long he'd be thinking of that response.  In any case, the Coast Guard and the Alameda Fire Department took care of him.  We found out that he'd fallen off his 32-foot boat, which later crashed into Pier 70 about 3 miles away.  And it was barely noon!  Once we got back to the dock after the excitement, we continued around San Francisco on a walking tour, led by our fearless history professor, Glenn Gordinier.  We hit a lot of the highlights of downtown San Francisco, including Fishermen's Wharf, Pier 39, Battery Street, the Old Ship Saloon on Pacific Street, and the Transamerica Building.  He had some interesting facts to share about the development of the city and how the gold rush affected shipping.  He said that in some places, there were whole ships buried below the street that had been abandoned during the gold rush and then covered over as the city expanded.  He also spent some time telling us about the Barbary Coast and the earthquake of 1906.  Once we'd trekked all around downtown San Francisco, it was back to the vans to head north to Bodega Bay.  The landscape up north is so very different than what we had seen so far.  We made it to the Bodega Bay Marine Laboratory and immediately went down to the beach to explore the beach and the tide pools. Classic Williams-Mystic.
     Day 6, October 7, began on a very windy, very curvy road along the edge of the cliffs ending at Fort Ross, which was a Russian fort.  We got a chance to explore the fort and some of the artifacts that had been found.  We made our way to the cliff for our lectures, but on the way up to said cliff, we passed by a camper van that had a map of the world (in French) with routes traced on many of the continents.  We happened to run into the couple who owned the van and I spent a little bit of time talking to the man (in French!).  I discovered that they are from a small island off the coast of southern France, they had been traveling around the world for the last 5 or so years, and this was their first time in the States.  He also was complaining that Americans speak too fast so he and his wife had trouble understanding their English.  I told him I can totally sympathize; I have that problem sometimes with native French speakers.  It was pretty rad.  Anyway, we had our lectures overlooking the Pacific.  Glenn talked a bit about the redwood industry and the effects it had on the coast.  It was pretty interesting to see a picture of the type of apparatus that would slide wood off the cliffs and onto waiting ships.  Very elaborately constructed.  Of course, the next thing to do after talking about the redwood trade was to visit an actual redwood forest, so that's exactly what we did.  The Armstrong Redwood Forest has some of the oldest redwoods on the west coast.  I have never seen trees that majestic in my entire life. This particular forest had an outdoor theatre amongst the trees (where we had our lecture of course), complete with stage and orchestra pit.

These pictures don't even begin to come close to depicting how huge these trees are.  You can't even fit a whole tree into one picture.  After hanging out in the theatre for a bit, we had a chance to explore some of the walking paths through the forest.  The natural light while we were there was the most amazing thing I've ever seen.  The light filters through these trees differently than anything I've ever seen.  I decided to walk down one of the paths by myself.  The silence that bounced between the trees is almost indescribable.  It's almost as if the trees are sharing their wisdom.  I know it sounds corny, but seriously, it sounds like the trees are talking to one another. Some of these trees are hundreds of years old.  It's amazing to think what the forest looked like when they were just saplings.  I wish we had had more time to just sit and listen.  Alas, the name of the game was fit as much in as possible, so we headed on to our next destination: Shell Beach.  We spent time at Shell Beach playing in the tide pools and discovering different creatures.  We found everything from octopuses to nudibranchs.

The illustrious sea clown - a type of sea slug.
They are very cute when on your hand.

We found a Sunstar that Jim decided to wear on his head.  It was slimy.

And of course, Glenn caught a fish.

We lucked out with an extremely low tide at Shell Beach, lower than any of the faculty had seen in previous years.  It was a very exciting tide-pooling experience :)
     October 8, Day 7, started off at Tomales Bay Oyster Company.  Martin, the owner of the oyster company, talked to us about the history of oystering in Tomales Bay.  Turns out, the Pacific oyster, which is the oyster farmed by Tomales Bay Oyster Company, is originally from off the coast of Japan and was brought over for its speed of growth and size.  Martin was also telling us how sustainable his business was because any shells that are shucked are put back in the bay to provide places for the baby crabs to hide and oyster spat to grow on.  We also had the chance to try raw oysters fresh out of the tanks.  Slimy, yet satisfying. From there, we headed around to the other side of Tomales Bay to check out the Point Reyes Lighthouse.  To get down to the actual lighthouse (I say down for a reason), we had to climb up to the top of the point and then walk down 308 steps to the lighthouse.  There was actually a sign that said if you had heart problems or any other types of medical conditions, you may want to consider not going down, because you had to then climb back up those 308 stairs.  While we were exploring the lighthouse, we spotted some gray whales feeding right off the coast.  This has certainly been the semester of whales for us.  From Point Reyes, we continued on to Drakes Beach, where we had a lecture on Sir Francis Drake himself and the history of the area.  While we were there, Rich had us do a lit prompt sitting somewhere on the beach by ourselves.  We had to describe the sound of the ocean, like Henry Bateson had.  It was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.  We had some time to play on the beach after finishing our prompts.  I encountered Jim narrating for a flock of sanderlings.  Jim was explaining that the sanderlings would run to the water's edge and feed quick, quick, quick and then outrun the next incoming wave; "run forest, run" as Jim puts it.  After Drakes Beach, we headed back to the lab for the evening.  We happened to be staying at the lab at the same time as some guys from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) who were doing research.  So they gave us some of their time to explain what they were doing and how they had gotten into working for NOAA.  They were technical divers looking at shipwrecks off the coast, which is wicked cool!  It was very interesting to hear all the different paths they had taken to end up on that expedition.  
     October 9, Day 8, was our free day.  A few of us lobbied to go back to the redwoods for our free day instead of doing one of the offered activities.  We were successful!  We got a chance to spend a good portion of the morning exploring the redwoods.  Eventually, we found a fallen redwood tree to climb up on and sit for a while.  So we sketched and wrote in our journals, just enjoying being in the forest.  It was really quite impressive how many people didn't see us as they were walking by.  The tree we were sitting on was above them, but it amazed me how many of them didn't look up.  I spent a good portion of the time walking around the forest just looking up.  We moseyed out of the forest to begin our drive back to the lab.  Once we got back, we still had a little time to kill, so Steffi, Sonja and I decided to walk up to the Horseshoe Cove overlook.

It was so gorgeous looking down on the town of Bodega in the distance on one side and looking down on the marine lab and Horseshoe Cover on the other side.  While we were up there, the fog started rolling in around us, enough so that we could no longer see Horseshoe Cove after a while.  Eventually, we began our hike back down.  Steffi and Sonja decided to continue on; I went to explore some of the projects around the lab.  Thus began the saga of the sand dunes.  After spending some time at the lab, I left around 3:30 or so to get back to the lab dorms with some extra time to pack and shower before the 4:30 curfew.  I hadn't been through the sand dunes yet, so I decided to take the path through the dunes which was supposed to lead back to the dorms.  I followed said path until I came to a fork.  one direction went off to a 3 mile hike and the other direction went to a short walking path.  I took my best guess and avoided the three mile hike.  Shortly, I discovered that the walking path kind of ended, so instead of doing the intelligent thing and turning around, I proceeded to bushwhack off the path, through the dunes, down one dune and over the next.  By this point, it was around 4:00 and I was lost in the sand dunes.  The next dune I came over, I saw a road at the bottom.  So I headed for the road, down the dune, through the dead reeds and plants to the bottom.  What I didn't see was the ditch at the base of the dune because it was filled with reeds.  So I plunged into the ditch and skidded flat on my face onto what I discovered was a gravel dirt road.  I was not a happy camper. I also still had no clue where I was.  I could see the town of Bodega in the distance, so if worse came to worse, I could head for that.  After I got myself up and brushed myself off, I ignored my various cuts and wounds and tried to figure out where I was.  There was a water tank next to me.  I had stumbled across an access road.  Great. So I decided the road had to come out somewhere, so I followed it through a residential area to another dirt road and then finally to the main road.  I was halfway to town.  So I tried calling a few people to have them let someone in charge know that there was a slight possibility that I wouldn't be back at 4:30.  Unfortunately, no one was picking up their phone, none of the 6 people I called.  So I began the trek back along the main road to the dorms.  By the time I reached the dorms, bleeding and sore, it was 4:20.  What was supposed to have been a fifteen minute walk from the lab to the dorms on the main road took me almost an hour.  The dunes were gorgeous, until I fell.  The rest of the day was spent making our way back to San Francisco to spend the night so we could fly out early the next morning.  What. A. Trip.

Hang Ten

Let's pause for a minute and observe the epicness that is my history professor. He is teaching us how to tango this semester, he taught us how to two-step in Louisiana and today, he taught us how to surf!!!  It's November and I went surfing in Narragansett  today.  We left Mystic around 11 and arrived in Narragansett around noon.  We were in the water, fully suited up in wet suits by 12:30 or so.  We surfed for around two hours.  I never thought I'd find myself in the water in November in Connecticut, but today, I was out hitting the waves and actually getting up once or twice!  What a day!

Moot Court...AH!

     Tomorrow is Moot Court, which is why I haven't put up anything about California or Louisiana yet. I promise those are coming soon.  Anyway, two judges from Maine are coming down to judge our mock debate thing.  We've got a public versus private land rights case that we're arguing.  The landowners sued the Town of Wells because they say that the public doesn't have the right to recreate on their beach (because Maine is a low water mark state).  Basically they're suing based on unconstitutional takings and they want to be compensated for the public use of the beach for recreation (fishing, fowling, and navigating are already exceptions).

     I have discovered through this preparation process that I definitely shouldn't be a lawyer.  Not that I was planning a law career, but if I had ever entertained the notion, this pretty much kills it. Gah. I will stick with the science stuff thanks. I don't get interrupted by samples in a microscope. Anyway, moot court is tomorrow from 2pm-8pm.  Wheee!