Summer Stories
Well, summer is officially over, I am almost finished moving into my new room, and classes start in 2 short days! The next few days are filled with catching up with friends, so I thought I’d tell you guys all about my summer!
First off, it was WONDERFUL. I spent the month of May at home, catching up with my high school friends and baking lots of Pinterest desserts. It got to the point that my family asked me to stop making desserts because they were sick of all the sugar. I also sat around watching lots of HGTV, which then led me to want to redecorate our house. One frustrating trip to the Home Goods store later, I decided that interior decorating is actually hard and maybe I should just stick to engineering.
After a restful May, I flew down to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee where I spent the next two months. At Vanderbilt, I am a member of the Navigators, which is a Christian ministry, and they have a summer training program (STP) for all the colleges in the Southeast. The program was jam-packed with bible studies, workshops, and sermons from amazing speakers. Each person was put on a team of four people, who all lived in a hotel room together and one of them was the team leader and discipler. I absolutely loved the girls on my team to death. We were all from different schools (Mercer, USF, and Cal State-Long Beach) but got along so well.
In addition to all the training, we worked at Dollywood, which yes, is Dolly Parton’s own amusement park. I got to work on an indoor roller coaster called the Blazing Fury. I loaded people on the ride and worked in dispatch with the microphone (I even got to tell bad jokes to everyone in line). For most kids it was their first roller coaster, so it was so much fun to see how excited they were. I really enjoyed meeting people from all over, including a family from Sweden, as well as all of my coworkers. As an employee of Dollywood, we got into most of the tourist attractions in the area for free, which was awesome! The entire summer was busy, but I still had plenty of time to have fun with the other people in the program.
After tearful goodbyes, I flew back to Chicago for two weeks in August. I relaxed quite a bit, and went on a vacation with my family to northern Wisconsin. We stayed at a resort on an island surrounded by a river that divided Wisconsin from the upper peninsula of Michigan. It was a chill few days in the outdoors full of white water rafting, an iron mine tour, and golf/driving the golf cart around.
As a whole, my summer was incredible. I had time for some much-needed rest, but I also had plenty of adventures in eastern Tennessee and I got to meet so many new people. While it was sad to come to an end, I am elated to be back at Vandy and start my junior year!