Las Cruces, pt. 5: Rest day

After fruit lab ended, our "weekend" finally began. Because we move around so much during the semester and are incorporating lectures, lab work, AND field work into everything we learn, our days are jam-packed with activities. To make the absolute most of our time, we don't actually have weekends off. Instead, we have one "rest day" every ten days or so. By the time Sunday night came along, we were all more than ready for a break from school, which keeps us busy virtually all day from 6:30 am to 9:00 pm.

We decided to go into San Vito, since we had only spent about 45 minutes in town earlier in the week to buy our rubber boots, and also since we hadn't really left the field station at all during the prior seven days. Luckily we were well-fed after fruit lab, because we stayed out until after 1 am (this is REALLY late considering our typical daily schedule!) dancing at a bar in town. 27/28 of the group went out (this required 5 taxis, which was pretty funny to organize) and everyone seemed to have a good time. I had a lot of fun just dancing and relaxing and not worrying about having to wake up early the next morning.

Me and two of my roommates at the bar... The dancing had not yet begun, which you can tell by the fact that we aren't super sweaty!

The next day we slept in until 9 am, which comparatively felt like a real luxury! It also meant that we missed breakfast, though. I spent the morning re-organizing my part of the room and getting a load of laundry together to be done. Around 10:30 I set out with three of my roommates on a dual mission: to collect bugs to identify, and to find a waterfall where you can supposedly swim. Neither parts of the mission went exactly as planned, but probably for the better. We found 4 or 5 insects to potentially ID, which was a fair amount but not as many as we had intended to collect. However, I liked the fact that we weren't too focused on the assignment, since we just got to enjoy our hike instead. After a while, we forgot that we were even carrying around our bug net!

A blue morpho butterfly that we ran into on our hike. We were unsuccessful catching it to ID, but we did get to watch it fly around for a bit. It's large (about 5" wings) and the other side of its wings are bright blue!

We also never found the waterfall, which turned out to not be our fault. The professor that we had asked for directions the day before told us the complete wrong way to go, so we hiked an entirely different trail than we should have. Again, this ended up being a good mistake because even though we didn't find the waterfall we found an excellent place to swim. We walked upstream a little bit from the river we crossed earlier in the week and found a pool about four feet deep and ten feet wide, so we actually got to go in the water. Other students who actually made it to the waterfall said that it was a nice looking waterfall but the "pool" at the bottom is actually only about 6" deep so you can't actually swim in it.

We brought bag lunches out to the river and ate by the pool.

Tessa holding her lunch container, saying "Hi, Mr. Cott!"

Stephanie in the pool we found.

 Overall we ended up having a nice hike, lunch, and swim. It started to rain while we were out so we headed back around 1:30. After we got back to Wilson House we all showered and changed, and then hung out until 4 pm, when we took the OTS jeep into San Vito. Since it was our day off, professors generously offered rides into town every two hours throughout the day. I took the last ride in with 9 other students so we could walk around the town a bit more and then go out for dinner. We wandered around the town for a bit, looking in shops and stopping at the grocery store to get things to bring back to the station, and then went to an Italian restaurant for dinner. Although the food at Las Cruces is excellent, it was still really nice to go out for something different for one night. We got three pizzas and three salads and shared them between the ten of us.

Group photo at the pizzeria.

The dinner was a nice opportunity to hang out with each other in a non-academic context and get to know each other a little better. Since we've been spending every waking moment together, I think we all occasionally forget that we've only known each other for a week and that there is still so much to learn about each other. We got back to Las Cruces around 7:30 and, at least in the Armadillo room, were all asleep by 10, exhausted from activities even on our day off. It was really really nice to have a break from classes, though, and get to whatever we wanted to, at our own pace. I definitely feel refreshed and ready to learn more!