Wednesday

Bus Ride

We left Blair on Wednesday at 12:30. Before, that we loaded the busses with our luggage and supplies. The bus ride lasted 3 and a half hours. On the way, we passed by a lot of different landscapes and bridges. One of the long bridges we drove on was the William Preston Lane Jr. Memorial Bay Bridge, which went over the Chespeake Bay.

After a long ride full of Schwartzs Math Packet and splling Pepsi, we arrived at Wallops Island, Virginia, which is located on the Delmarva Peninsula. Everyone was assigned a dorm room and teacher chaperone on the bus. All the luggage was unloaded into the common room, which we then carried to our rooms.

Dinner and Night Hike

Unluckily, some of us had to go to our first class on Coastal Ecology and Boat Safety before dinner. We learned about water measurements like pH, salinity, turbidity. One of the safety rules we learned was Water-Line-You, which meant to stay behind the line on the boat.

Our dinner was chicken and mashed potatos. We had to get our temperature measured beforehand though to make sure none of us were sick. Dinner was OK tbh. Aiden kept getting seconds and thirds.

The first field activity we did was a night hike. We boarded the buses, which were basically green refurbished school buses. We drove onto the Chincoteague Island, where the sun had just started setting, creating a really nice sunset. Our photos were really blurry because of all the fog on the windows.

The sun really began setting a few minutes into the hike. We were soon surrounded in pitch black. Our guide explained the different adaptations that animals developed to live nocturnally. After learning about the hearing in animals like owls, we played a blindfolded game to simulate how animals depend on hearing to navigate.

Our tour guide also passed around different scents so that we could learn about smell. Another game we played taught us about touch. We were each given a type of shell and had to find the other person with the same type, using only descriptions of touch.