Since Europe is still more than a month away, I figured it would be helpful (and fun! ) to tell some stories about other trips I’ve been on. This one is from the summer after my sophomore year of college. For anybody interested, the program is called Wildland Studies – I highly recommend it!
A drop of rain, cold as ice, manages to find a way inside my tightly zipped jacket, trickling a triumphant path down my spine. As the skies above continue to dump torrents of water on us, more beads of water follow. Water, sweat – at this point I don’t know what it all is; everyone in our group, myself included, is hustling as fast as they can. I’m trekking across the top of a mountain with fifteen other people I’d just met a week and a half before. We’ve all got backpacks of at least 30 pounds, making running clumsy. Oh, and did I mention – we’re in the middle of a lightning storm that seems intent on killing all of us? In the middle of bear country?
I’ve always been a nature girl, which seems at odds with the fact that I like dressing fashionably and enjoy trips to any big city. Those who know me may say I’m more cosmopolitan, but my roots – and my heart – belong to the woods. So when I heard about a program through CSU Monterey Bay that set up trips all around the world for college students looking to get into nature, I was stoked. I didn’t have anything else to do that summer, so why not?
