My Trip To Cardigan:

Day 1

Day 1 had a lot to do with Movement. See, this was the day we “moved” into Cardigan lodge for three days. We loaded our things into the trailer, and then got on our method of movement, the bus. The ride up was very boring, at least for me. There was nothing to do, and everybody was stalking super loud, etc. But when we got there we were greeted by cheerful staff who gave us directions into the building and to our respective floors. When we got to our bunks, we unpacked our things (Movement) and settled in. Guess you could say we “set up camp”. The rooms were actually great! We got a dresser to put our things in (personally, we moved our towels and things in there), and the beds were okay. We went down to the lawn next, and we played a small game and then met with our newly assigned hiking groups. In our groups we made rules of the group (be kind, do not rush ahead, etc.). Then, we started our first hike. We hiked on over to Welton Falls first but sadly we did not make it all the way to the falls, as one of our group members got injured (restricting their movement). But still it was fun. We got to the stream and I did some rock jumping, moving all the way to a dead tree at the far end of the stream, we saw a salamander, and some type of macroinvertebrate. On the way back we played a game with our partner where one of us was blindfolded, and the other would lead us to a random tree offtrail. We would get a good sense of it, then walk back to the trail and take off our blindfolds and find our tree. And then we actually went back to the lodge. I think by that time is was getting a little dark, so we had some free time before dinner. I can’t remember what I did during that time though. I believe I sat in my bed for mostly the whole time, so that was pretty boring. For dinner that night, we had tacos, and were introduced to the concept of ORT (wasted food), which my table had plenty of sadly. And then, we did stories, and went to bed after our first day at Cardigan. So, in conclusion, Day 1, was all about moving in, and movement in general.

Sketches

A nice birch tree we stopped to sketch on the way to the river...

Some trees I saw when we got to the river. Notice one of them depicts trees in a weird formation.

This is one of the trees I was taken to during the blindfold game. I did a bark rubbing and a standard sketch.