Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Casa Grande, AZ HOT HOT HOT

Hello from Arizona!! We made it here to Casa Grande last Tuesday, a week ago (times flies when youre having fun)! It is about an hour and a half north of Tuscon and an hour south of Phoenix. The work we are doing here is we are building new trails on Casa Grande Mountain.

Our hike up Casa Grande Mountain!

My team on a part of the trail we already built!

Our beautiful view from the mountain, cacti galore!
 So far it’s been pretty hard because I’ve had two projects inside that consist of sitting and not doing too much physical labor! This is a lot of labor. We have to hike about a mile and a half just to get to where we start working. When we get up there, we all take turns pick axing new trail and using a McLeod to flatten it out. I have mostly taken over the job of following behind everyone and making it look pretty and even (if you can imagine with me and my semi-ocd with having things perfect) The two days we had up on the mountain last week its been HOT it was in the high 80s and I was dying! But this week is supposed to be mid 70s so I hope that will help me adjusting to this hard work! I’ve been bringing about 5 water bottles. The first guy to help us on the mountain suggested we drink ¾ of our body weight in ounces, so basically I should be drinking 4 nalgenes worth of water in a day! So I freeze most of them and they stay pretty cold all day.But I haven;t been drinking as much as I should because I refuse to wilder-pee!  We decided we are going to have early work days so we aren’t out in the hot all day, we start at about 7:30 and leave the mountain around 2:30 for our half hour hike down. So it’s nice to have the afternoon to get home and shower and do whatever business needs to get done.

Speaking of our home! We have a pretty good setup! We are living in the city’s aquatic park, which is essentially a large outdoor pool with a large sweet slide! (pictures to come soon) Bad part is, we can’t swim in it L not only is it against AmeriCorps policies but the city doesn’t want to be liable for anything that would happen to us. So that stinks especially when we will be dealing mostly with 90s and 100s by the time we leave Arizona! So we mostly all sleep in this one square room, but some people have been sleeping outside its so nice at night (not me, im very picky with my sleeping situation).

Our tease of a backyard, at least we can sit by it...

Little picnic area where we eat dinner

one side of the square room we live in (my big mess is the air mattress)

Our backyard of fields with kids playing sports all the time!
Also! I finally booked a plane ticket to come home to Maine for Easter weekend! We have Friday the 22nd and Monday the 25th off for a long weekend, so I took Thursday the 21st off from work to give me extra time to travel since it will take me all day (or all night in my case) I am going to take a bus up to Phoenix Wednesday night and fly out at 11:50pm and take the red eye to Boston so I can have an extra full day at home! So I’ll get into Boston at 11am and may stay in Boston for the day, or take a bus home and hopefully see some of your lovely faces!!!! Don’t have many plans really, so let me know if you want to see me at some point!
So for this project (im sure I already mentioned this, but it doesn’t hurt to repeat it) we have a whole new team. I only have one person from my old team which I am thankful for because I love her and shes an awesome support for me! But so far this team is fantastic! There are a lot of positive people who like to get things done as I do and aren’t just lazy butts. We have 7 girls (including our awesome team leader) and 3 guys, so its nice that the females have the majority it makes things a little easier to handle! I think I’m going to really like this team, but at the same time I miss my original team but I’m sure theyre having a fantastic time!
We had this past weekend as a three day weekend (Sat, Sun and Mon off), we will have some weeks like that but others we have community builds on some Saturdays and work those Monday’s when we have the community builds. I’m excited because this city is absolutely amazing. They used to have only like 10,000 people but have grown to have 50,000 people not including the snow birds that come from the Midwest and other places. So they are a town that has recently boomed. The people we work with are fantastic and everyone has great connections to make our time here a great time. Also these people are so grateful for our help. I never realized that just by helping to build a trail for a community would have such a large impact. There was one day this week we were in the middle of working and a biker came up behind me and I said “um….the trail kind of ends here!” He was so thankful that we are extended what he was used to doing. It’s going to eventually be a loop that people can get from one end of the mountain to the other. So far one our first day we built 170 ft of trail (we were down 3 people that day too) and 240 the next day (with 2 more people back) so we are off to a great start because apparently we are on a fairly difficult section of the mountain.

So as you can see I am very excited about this project and the work we’re doing! It’s going to be the most work I’ve done in my life but it will be so rewarding. I’m expecting to come home in one month at least 10 lbs lighter and much, much tanner than most of you Mainers! I can’t wait to finally become healthy and in shape all just by doing my job. I will try to post more often this project! We have internet access at our “home” but not enough for skype or watching tv at all, but enough to post!  See some of you in one month!!!!! J

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