This week was lecture recess, which is just a free week in the middle of the semester. I can't believe there are only 5 weeks of classes left, plus a week off and 2 weeks of exams. I don't want to be this close to leaving Oz!
Anyway, to recap this week's adventures. The first few days I just sat around and relaxed, and got up to date on Gossip Girl. That show is way too addicting, which I should have known, because one of the writers was behind The OC, which was yet another of my secret shames.
On Sunday, I went camping with a bunch of Western Courts kids. We drove about an hour away to this random, secluded beach. We had to off-road through mud and water for about 15 minutes from the road to the actual beach. It was fun. It was like this little beach hide-away, and we were the only ones there. We just hung out and talked. We went fishing later on in the day, and we sat on the beach and watched shooting stars. It was pretty awesome. My group left the next day and spent Monday at Crystal Creek on the way home. It was really nice and the water was really cold. There are rock slides (we made a train of the five of us and went down together once...haha) and tall rocks to jump from. It took me awhile to get the courage to jump the first time, and I only went twice. It's best not to try your luck! Here are some pictures:
The view from our tent and driving on the beach
Me jumping off the giant rock and a picture of the falls
On Tuesday night, a few of the WC girls came to visit me in Rotary and we cooked dinner. It was really good to have some people visit! Western's just more social than Rotary, and all of the people I know are over there. We cooked chicken and pasta and made salad, and just hung out. It was delicious, and I got to keep the leftovers on this side of campus. Score! (PS- You can tell how burnt I got the morning of camping in this picture...I looked like a lobster, and now I have a really bad farmer's and shorts tan)
Betsy, Julia and Danielle cooking and us sitting down for dinner:)
On Thursday, we got up bright and early at 5am to head to Undara Volcanic National Park for our Vertebrate Fauna field trip. This was the beginning of many days without adequate sleep. We'd get up super early (5:30-ish) and do stuff until dinner at 7pm or 9pm that night. We got to see a bunch of animals though, so it was pretty cool. We caught birds, bats, reptiles of all sorts (frogs, lizards, geckos, snakes...), and small mammals, like bandicoots. There were lots of roos and wallabies, as well as many, many spiders. There isn't much water at the park, so we didn't shower for four days. I'm pretty sure we all smelt superbad, especially when we went to bed with 5 people in our 4 person tent, but we were all equally smelly and just got used to it. (I showered twice when we got back and my feet still weren't completely clean!)
It was fun, but I was so ready to leave and get back to my nice comfy bed...sleeping on the ground is no fun. So we got up early for our last day of activities. We were split into groups and my group, team orange (Go Tigers!), was scheduled for birding and reptile captures, before heading back to pack up camp. We did birding and headed back to camp to get a vehicle and green team, of which Julia was a member. We drove out and did a quick session, and then got into our cars to head back. We were all super excited because we were soooo close to getting on the bus to head back to Townsville. All of team orange, except one guy, got into our SUV. So 6 students plus the driver. I was sitting in the second row, against the right side of the car. Well, our driver was a bit reckless, and the other assistants had been complaining during the week about his driving. So he was talking about how people were underestimating his driving skills and such, and about halfway back to camp he said something about fishtailing, and the next thing I know, we were fishtailing on this dirt/rocky road. I thought he was doing it on purpose, so it didn't really hit me that he was out of control until about the third fishtail, when we left the road and I saw trees coming at my side of the car. We had spun around and were facing the opposite direction that we had been traveling. All I was thinking was, this isn't going to happen, this isn't going to happen, and then I realized that we really were going to hit the trees. I was just thinking, oh my God, get away from the side of the car! I was wearing my seatbelt, so I just leaned as far away from the side as possible over the girl in the middle. I saw one tree coming straight at me, but since were were going really fast and spinning, it hit a bit further back than I had thought it would. When we slammed into the tree, the car spun a 180 back to the direction we had been traveling. We almost flipped onto our side, but somehow we didn't. The driver yelled to ask if everyone was okay and I looked at the people in the front and beside me to see if we were okay, then I turned to look at the two people in the back. The guy on the other side was okay, but the girl sitting right behind me definitely was not. I could see straight into her arm, where a two inch wide hole was. It looked like her arm had exploded from the inside out. The tree had hit about a foot and a half behind my head, right in the middle of her seat. The window had shattered (I realized when we got back to Townsville that glass had gone down my shirt and I didn't notice until I went to take a shower 8 hours after the crash) and there was a huge indent of the tree all the way down the car. Kara was trained in first aid, and she and I got the first aid kit and started bandaging Krystal up to stop the bleeding. Then the green team arrived behind us (we had left them far behind us in our speediness) and headed the 2km back to camp to get some help, because our radio hadn't been working. Krystal, the girl who had broken her arm, was definitely in pain, but she was just kind of staring off into space. It was so insane. The last I heard, she had broken her arm in multiple places, I think the ulna and the humerous. Her humerous had broken through the skin. It didn't bother me nearly as much as I thought it would to see those bones and apply pressure to stop the bleeding. Maybe I can still make it as a doctor. Anway, since we were in the middle of nowhere, they airlifted her out to Cairns, but it took at least an hour an a half for the chopper to get there. I couldn't imagine sitting there without painkillers with that injury. She had to have surgery and stuff, so just keep her in your prayers. The rest of the kids in the car were very, very, very lucky, and I only have a little bruise on the side of my knee and my elbow where I hit the side of the car and I had a bit of a headache yesterday, which is completely gone today. I don't know how we managed to miss the rest of those trees, because there were a lot of them. In one of the pictures below, you can see what the sides of the road looked like, and just how luckly we were. I would have taken pictures of the accident site if no one would have been hurt, but I figured that would probably be inappropriate (just FYI, if I'm ever the one hurt or in an accident, please take pictures, as long as I'm getting the proper medical treatment. I heart pictures of my life!). Like I said in my facebook status: What are the odds that I would crash into a tree in the middle of the Australian bush on the day after my 21st birthday? Because I totally beat them!
Oh yeah, I did celebrate my 21st birthday camping in the Australian bush. Fun times. Everyone sang Happy Birthday around the campfire that night and I got a toasted marshmallow from somebody, which was pretty cool. Who would have thunk it?
Other than the exciting last day, full of crashing into trees and interviews with Queensland constables, the trip was pretty fun. Here are some pictures:)
It was fun, but I was so ready to leave and get back to my nice comfy bed...sleeping on the ground is no fun. So we got up early for our last day of activities. We were split into groups and my group, team orange (Go Tigers!), was scheduled for birding and reptile captures, before heading back to pack up camp. We did birding and headed back to camp to get a vehicle and green team, of which Julia was a member. We drove out and did a quick session, and then got into our cars to head back. We were all super excited because we were soooo close to getting on the bus to head back to Townsville. All of team orange, except one guy, got into our SUV. So 6 students plus the driver. I was sitting in the second row, against the right side of the car. Well, our driver was a bit reckless, and the other assistants had been complaining during the week about his driving. So he was talking about how people were underestimating his driving skills and such, and about halfway back to camp he said something about fishtailing, and the next thing I know, we were fishtailing on this dirt/rocky road. I thought he was doing it on purpose, so it didn't really hit me that he was out of control until about the third fishtail, when we left the road and I saw trees coming at my side of the car. We had spun around and were facing the opposite direction that we had been traveling. All I was thinking was, this isn't going to happen, this isn't going to happen, and then I realized that we really were going to hit the trees. I was just thinking, oh my God, get away from the side of the car! I was wearing my seatbelt, so I just leaned as far away from the side as possible over the girl in the middle. I saw one tree coming straight at me, but since were were going really fast and spinning, it hit a bit further back than I had thought it would. When we slammed into the tree, the car spun a 180 back to the direction we had been traveling. We almost flipped onto our side, but somehow we didn't. The driver yelled to ask if everyone was okay and I looked at the people in the front and beside me to see if we were okay, then I turned to look at the two people in the back. The guy on the other side was okay, but the girl sitting right behind me definitely was not. I could see straight into her arm, where a two inch wide hole was. It looked like her arm had exploded from the inside out. The tree had hit about a foot and a half behind my head, right in the middle of her seat. The window had shattered (I realized when we got back to Townsville that glass had gone down my shirt and I didn't notice until I went to take a shower 8 hours after the crash) and there was a huge indent of the tree all the way down the car. Kara was trained in first aid, and she and I got the first aid kit and started bandaging Krystal up to stop the bleeding. Then the green team arrived behind us (we had left them far behind us in our speediness) and headed the 2km back to camp to get some help, because our radio hadn't been working. Krystal, the girl who had broken her arm, was definitely in pain, but she was just kind of staring off into space. It was so insane. The last I heard, she had broken her arm in multiple places, I think the ulna and the humerous. Her humerous had broken through the skin. It didn't bother me nearly as much as I thought it would to see those bones and apply pressure to stop the bleeding. Maybe I can still make it as a doctor. Anway, since we were in the middle of nowhere, they airlifted her out to Cairns, but it took at least an hour an a half for the chopper to get there. I couldn't imagine sitting there without painkillers with that injury. She had to have surgery and stuff, so just keep her in your prayers. The rest of the kids in the car were very, very, very lucky, and I only have a little bruise on the side of my knee and my elbow where I hit the side of the car and I had a bit of a headache yesterday, which is completely gone today. I don't know how we managed to miss the rest of those trees, because there were a lot of them. In one of the pictures below, you can see what the sides of the road looked like, and just how luckly we were. I would have taken pictures of the accident site if no one would have been hurt, but I figured that would probably be inappropriate (just FYI, if I'm ever the one hurt or in an accident, please take pictures, as long as I'm getting the proper medical treatment. I heart pictures of my life!). Like I said in my facebook status: What are the odds that I would crash into a tree in the middle of the Australian bush on the day after my 21st birthday? Because I totally beat them!
Oh yeah, I did celebrate my 21st birthday camping in the Australian bush. Fun times. Everyone sang Happy Birthday around the campfire that night and I got a toasted marshmallow from somebody, which was pretty cool. Who would have thunk it?
Other than the exciting last day, full of crashing into trees and interviews with Queensland constables, the trip was pretty fun. Here are some pictures:)
Our tent of 5 people and chowing down at dinner time
A sweet shot of us checking out a roo and me holding a velvet gecko
Shot of me when we were looking for reptiles...right before our accident
One of the smaller roads. Tthe one we were on when we crashed was more gravelly and had way more trees on the side. Like I said. Incredibly lucky.
That's about it for this fun-filled week. Hope everything's going well, and good luck to all of you Clemson kids kicking off finals week today! Miss y'all!
-Jess
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