Tuesday...Road Trip

After breakfast we jumped on board the shuttle boat to Antlers.  The big adventure of the day was visiting the Adirondack Wild Center and the Adirondack Museum.  Our first stop was to the Wild Center.  This was about an hour drive from Raquette Lake.  I drove with Julie and Matt in Karl & Beth’s car.  I ended up sleeping during most of the drive to the Wild Center.  The Wild Center was a beautiful place.  It was built on the site of an old sand and gravel quarry.  It is now a space dedicated to education about the wild spaces of the Adirondack Park and the staff is doing an excellent job of helping the natural landscape grow back.  It contained many interesting displays about Adirondack natural history, past and present.  I really enjoyed the display about the glaciers having had the chance to see the Exit Glacier in Alaska last year.  There is a pond that is next to the museum that gives you the feeling that you are actually in the pond when you are looking at it from inside the museum.  I thought that was an amazing feeling.  After about 1½ hours we traveled to the Adirondack Museum.

The Adirondack Museum had a lot more exhibits than the Wild Center.  While I think that information about the wild is important, I found the exhibits here to be much more fascinating.  After eating lunch here, I started exploring the exhibits.  Among my favorites were the rail car, the one-room schoolhouse, the 1932 and 1980 Lake Placid Olympics, and the Adirondack Furniture.  After spending about three hours here, we got back into Karl & Beth’s car and made the trip back to Antlers.

After dinner we had a large-group discussion about our individual projects.  I am looking at creating a DBQ about the lifestyles of inhabitants of the Adirondack Park.  I helped to write a DBQ once as a project in 9^th grade history class.  This will be the first time that I will be doing one on my own.  I feel like I took a lot of good pictures at the museums today and will combine those pictures with some excerpts from books and data that I am able to find.  We will have some time on Wednesday and Thursday to work on the project, so I feel confident that I will be able to put together a quality piece of work that I can use once I find a full-time teaching position.

Beth finished our classroom session by reading a passage from an Adirondack short story.  After that I went to the Sauna.  I thought that everyone had left without me since no one was at the meeting place.  So I went to the sauna on my own and discovered that I was the first person there.  It turned out that I was the first person to arrive at the meeting place.  I did see three deer eating grass as I was walking out there; it was a peaceful sight.  The group was much smaller tonight than it was yesterday.  But I had a fun time with Kathy, Nicole, Tim, and Tom (Camp Huntington’s intern).  After a quick warm shower I wrote this post and went to bed.  Good night!