The End of One Adventure

Well, I have only one week left here in Southern Illinois. It has been a blast. The team has had its ups and downs;but in the end everything turned out okay.After our first week here in Illinois, we lost a team member. It was a sad time that he decided he needed to leave us. We told him we would miss him, and as a team brought him to St. Louis to see him off. The second week we started trail building. Over these past 3 weeks we built over 1000 feet of trail in the Shawnee National forest. We switched tent buddies weekly, and made our supper over a propane oven. We had mound fires in the evening, and played Uno by lantern light. It wasn't just the 10 of us though, a worker at the Forest who is a Vista member was with us. He made our camping and trail building experience even more enjoyable. It was great getting to know him, along with the rest of my team better. I don't feel so distanced from them anymore. There are still space issues, but it is nowhere near so bad as it was at the beginning. It's all a time thing. I enjoyed my time staying in the tents, and I am sad to be leaving. I like trail building also, although, I don't think it's something I want to do everyday. It was difficult to stay in the campers on the weekends. Alternating beds in their for 6 girls is hard, and that is really where the personal bubble problems happened. The first night, it was a pain that the boys just pounded into the trailer to get food at 8 because they did so in such an obnoxious way, I felt like I was disrespected, but that was a one time thing, and there has been no trouble between anybody, so it's all good. This is our last week, and we will be staying in the campers, working at the ranger station in Jonesboro. On Thursday or Friday we will be leaving for Vinton IA again. This time it will be a long stay because my next round will be there, and in Cedar Rapids. Oak One will have the whole campus to ourselves. I really hope we get the stuff so we can play laser tag, or dart tag all over campus. That would so rock!!!