Super Fantastic Ridiculous Day

Lessons Learned Today:

Lesson #1: Don’t fiddle with the coordinates on the GPS.

            -one wrong number sends you in the completely opposite direction; experienced by most of us during our GPS treasure hunt today)

Lesson #2: Don’t be distracted by the GPS; always bring your camera

            -evident in the lack of photos in our blog slideshow

Lesson #3: Don’t jump on rusty boat floors

            -floor boards of 1920’s built ship tend to be rusty and thin; it would be a painful way to meet your end

Lesson #4: Throw rocks at the scuttled boat before entering

            -polar bears are smarter than we realize and hide inside the boat from scientists in helicopters

Lesson #5: It’s really hard to post a blog entry when the internet in the entire town is down

            -it’s still down as we type this

Today we followed our very knowledgeable guide, Paul, on a hike around Bird Cove. Something to note: when hiking in wet bog and marshlands, hiking boots and rain boots may not do the trick. Piggyback riding is the way to go!

Paul led us on a buffet of the tundra. As we walked, he and Doug pointed out different plants we could eat including wild blueberries (a tiny bit sour, but still good), puff balls (mushroom), seaweed, and a tundra salad like plant.

Our hike took us down through the low tide beach. The Ithaca is a large boat built in the 1920’s but was scuttled on out Bird’s Cove in 1961. It was supposedly stranded on suspicious grounds and so ship insurance for it was only paid in part. The Italian leader, Mussolini also used the boat as well.

The floor boards of the Ithaca are dangerously thin. There are parts rusted with holes; watching our step while inside the boat was extremely important.

We saw an abundance of wild life; many birds walking along the shore and although we didn’t physically see a bear today, we saw its tracks along the sand.

By the time we hiked back to the bus for lunch, everyone’s feet were completely soaked!

GPS treasure hunt time! After a lesson on everything GPS yesterday, we were all feeling very confident about our GPS skills, but we soon realized that it would be much more difficult than we had originally thought.

By the time we were halfway through, most of us had been majorly mislead by our glowing technological beacons. Once we had discovered all of our “treasures” we were tasked with decoding a message using all of the hints we had collected. The message read:

“Why do people give each other flowers to celebrate various important occasions? They’re taking a creatures life! Why stop at plants? Sweetheart let's make up. Here have this deceased squirrel.”

Here are some photos from the activities that we took part in today!

Lavina and Jacob