1. I love my lady friends, and
2. I am absolutely 100% terrified of the dark.
That being said...
Kirksville.
Sigh.
Living in a small town lends itself to many things, one of which is being extremely creative on how you spend your time. Luckily, Truman is a pretty intense school so free time is not often abundant, but the 3-day weekend after the first week of classes was looking pretty bare. And there are only so many baby elephant videos you can watch on Youtube.
And so that is how Sunday became dedicated to random adventure time.
Cue one of the best weekends at Truman ever.
First of all, in order to embrace our TTS (Typical Truman Student; i.e. nerd) syndrome, we created a Googledoc to organize our adventures and create an agenda, beginning with...
The Abandoned Ski Lodge
First up was the abandoned ski lodge. In the 80's there was a legit ski lodge in Kirksville but it was forced to close because of a couple of warm winters. The remains of the ski lodge are about a mile off of Rainbow Basin (gravel) road and you have to walk through the woods to get there.
Saturday night was actually my 3rd attempted trip to the infamous ski lodge. The first trip was last Spring and consisted of wandering around the woods at night and ultimately not finding anything but a car that was hotboxing (they got scared when we tapped on the window). The second trip was this past August, and ended in success as I went with some experienced ski lodge finders. Both of these prior times I had been accompanied by big, scary boys. Not this time.
As me and 4 of my closest friends drove down that gravel road, we pretty much knew we were the stupid girls from every scary movie combined. We parked the car and hesitated to get out. There was confusion on where the trail actually started.. was it by the parking lot or further up the road? We decided it was further up the road. So we got out of the car and started walking along the gravel.
We got startled by some deer that were in the field to our left. Deer attack when they are mad, right?
It was during this walk to the entrance of the woods that I confessed to my pals that I was legitimately afraid of the dark and that I still sleep with a light on.
Ultimately, we decided to adventure to the ski lodge another day, preferably when it was still light outside or when we became friends with 20 football players.
Since we didn't actually make it to the ski lodge Saturday night, I'll include some pictures of when I went there in August:
It's scary stuff.
University Farm Stargazing
After being in the middle of nowhere for a few minutes, we realized how beautiful and clear the night sky was, so we headed to the University Farm to stargaze. The rational was that at the farm, we would still be free of light pollution, but at least we were on Truman property if we were murdered.
According to my Google Sky Map application, Jupiter was making an appearance. Jupiter:
...He's shy. Another group of people were also there and they had telescope which they shared with us. We got a better view of the planet and of our neighbor galaxy.
Budweiser Horse
Our next mission was to climb on top of the Budweiser horse on the roof of the Budweiser building, which was thought to be within jumping distance.
It was not.
HyVee
By now it was about 9, and we were hungry girls (no time for dinner when you're too busy adventuring), so it was snack time.
But dance parties always take priority.
I only had 3 dollars and I wanted to maximize my purchasing capability, so I logically bought a scratcher ticket.
Apparently the Christmas ones aren't as lucky in January.
So I was down to $2. Luckily Cheese Balls are only $1.85 plus tax.
Also... bacon flavored popcorn? Ewwwwwwww
Train Bridge
Snacks in hand, it was time to road trip 10 miles south of our great town to the train bridge. Getting to the train bridge also required turning off of highway 63 onto some random sketchy gravel road and then onto another sketchy gravel road, which we didn't know the names of.
Did you know that you can't drive 45 mph on gravel?
We eventually found the road to turn onto, and made our way to the train bridge, which apparently is a really cool place to be if a train happens to be going under you while you're there.
In event that a train doesn't come, it's a neat place to take pictures.
On the way back to Kirksville, Liz and I decided we had careers in tractor modeling.
Totally Party
Anyone else would be ready to kick up their feet after such exhaustive adventures. Not us, we were ready to pop up our polos.
The adventures are to be continued. There is much more to be done.
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
― Mark Twain
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