I made it through the wilderness...

I am back in St. Louis after a week of wilderness fun in southern Illinois. I was pretty close when I guessed that they would drop us off in the woods and make us find our way to camp. We were broken into teams and each team started some place different. We had a series of places that we had to go to and we used a topography map and a compass to find our way. We quickly figured out that the map was very old and outdated when we got to our first stream... clearly marked on the map, but in reality was just a dried up stream bed. We started our hiking around 7 in the evening and it quickly got dark. We hiked until 11:30 when we got to our camp site for the evening. We slept under a rock overhang and around 5 a.m. realized how very lucky we were to have such a great shelter. It rained all morning and we managed to stay nice and dry. The next day we hiked from about 8 to 2 then stopped for lunch at our site. There were canoes waiting for us because to get to our final site we had to canoe across a lake. I thought this would be the easiest part of the journey. That was not the case. The lake was really an old valley that was flooded to make it a lake. There were trees sticking up everywhere... but the real challenge was under the surface. After about ten minutes of leisurely paddling we managed to wedge our canoe in an under water tree V. We had a small canoe with three people in it and our 45 lb packs... needless to say we were ridding pretty low. After much spinning we managed to free ourselves only to get stuck a couple more times along the way.

Never the less we made it and I can say with certainty that Qwest was defiantly challenging and exciting and I am very glad I did it. The rest of the week we learned more about the history of Americorps and how the program runs. We also spent a day doing service work. I worked with the forest service and helped clear a fire line. All in all it was a great week and I met a ton of very incredible people, all are driven to serve and know how to have fun doing it.

At the moment I am blogging from a laundry mat that has free wifi and expensive laundry... yes it is the same mat that I walked to last week. We are without Internet still, but we are making it work. My third roommate moved in yesterday and she is very cool. Yeah for rent split three ways.

The rest of the week I will be filling out paperwork and getting ready for Montana. I am not sure exactly when were are leaving but I will let you all know when I find out.

Until then,
Elsa