Archives for January 2020

This week on this blog I am going to talk about one of the stories that I have accumulated when I was a Boy Scout. Before I begin this story, I was in the scouts for 12 years of my life and the amount of stories that I have accumulated over those years are truly astonishing and picking one for this blog was a very difficult task. 

Over the course of a couple years I have found myself among 4 trips on the Appalachian Trail totaling 300 miles of hiking. My last trip was a surprise trip which occurred in the summer of 2018. My troup had been planning to hike at Philmont which is a massive scout ranch in New Mexico, which is the largest camp for scouts in the world. Our trec would be 100 miles and have a range of temperature of over 100 degrees to below freezing and snow at high altitude. This trip was the dream and it took about two years of planning to make it work. About a month before the trip, a wildfire broke out on the reservation causing Philmont to shut down all summer activities due to lack of containment. My heart was shattered for I was turning 18 and would never experience Philmont as a scout. In response some of the elder scouts had thrown together a plan to hike a 60 mile trek on the Appalachian Trail, something we had done multiple times before. We traveled down to Roanoke, VA where my grandmother lives and stayed with her for the night before setting off on the trail nearby. This trail was beautiful and featured McAfee’s Knob and Dragon Tooth. Along the trail, we had found ourselves setting up camp on one of the last days in a small meadow of grass on a knoll. Without a tree in sight, it was a beautiful sight of the valley and the surrounding hills. At the time it was clear skies and no predictions of rain were predicted. Around 7 o’clock some dark clouds had filled the sky very quickly and took us from surprise.

Within minutes there was a torrential downpour and lightning was striking the ground in the nearby mountaintops. Due to our positioning, our grassy knoll had become a possible lighting target due to the lack of trees and the elevated ground. I ordered all the boys to immediately leave their tents with minimal clothes and head to the tree cover, for we were in immediate danger. Although lightning did not hit the area of our tents, that moment of our tents whipping around and rain smashing into the sides was one of the scariest things that had occurred in scouts.

The main takeaway of the story is never predict the weather, pick camping locations based on smarts and picture worthy views. 

 

The story I am going to dive into this week is the story on a trip from England to France that seemed like it was straight out of National Lampoon’s Vacation series. It was the summer of  2013 when my family had plans to fly into England at Heathrow Airport and from there to go to Paris and then drive to Normandy and then back to London. This was the plan of the trip at least, but the way it worked out was not as flawless as it seemed. When we flew into London and everything seemed great until we realized the rental car company had only stick shifts. That was okay because my dad drove stick when he was a kid and knows it like no one else. However, one thing was different, the stick shift was in his left hand. He had never learned how to drive a stick with his left hand, which made all the difference. 

We pulled out the lot in our yellow Fiat 500 and my dad stalls almost immediately due to putting the car in the wrong gear. With people beeping behind we start the car again and head down the road to a parking circle. This became one of the most stressful things because parking circles are just so complicated when the driver is on the other side of the road. Meanwhile, while this was happening my sister and I was white-knuckling in the back of the car scared for our lives.

We make it out of London alive and we are on the roads driving to the white beautiful Dover cliffs to take a Ferry across the English Channel. With our luck we somehow drive straight to the part of the tunnel in which trucks can cross underneath on this complex train, however, we were not meant to do that. We pulled off to the shoulder on the road and my dad could not turn around for it was one-way traffic. We put the car into reverse and he floored it backward for 5 minutes to get to the nearest turn around the ramp. All I have to say from this to never ever use Apple Maps. I was scared for my life because while we were backing up, trucks were wissing by us, sometimes blasting horns. I was scared for my life. Once we went on the ramp and turned we found ourselves on a country road which was great until my dad realized that we were not in the United States and we nearly slammed into another car head-on. This trip ended up being a great deal of fun other than the parts where we almost crashed a few times.

 

Hello fellow bloggers, after my quick winter break, I am back and better than ever. Since my last blogs were about who I have met in the past and such this next section of the Welcome To My Home Blog will be a tad different. From here on out I will be talking about some stories of my past that make me the person I am today. For me, this will help me relive some of the painfully embarrassing mistakes and good times I have made over the years for they will never leave my memory for they will be here on this blog. This first story begins with Penn State, and when I fell in love with it in 11th grade.

Throughout high school, in 9th and 10th-grade years I had no idea where I wanted to attend college. I had ideas that maybe it could be far away, like in the south or on the west coast and then I found out how much this would end up being for my family. When looking around I found the Schreyer Honors College at Penn State and my goal was set. In 11 grade, my dream school was Schreyer and I fell in love with Penn State. I got the gear, watched all the games, and read everything from Onward State. It was the winter of my junior year when I found out about the Blue and White game. I had no idea what it was but it seemed like a great way to watch all my favorite players go at it under the sunny skies of April. When that day came around I had no idea it would be super sunny. I brought some sunscreen up to Penn State that day in preparation, however, something would then happen that would cause it to be confiscated. When rolling up to the game with my best friend Carson next to me, the people in front of me took a ‘swig’ of their sunscreen right in front of the security guards. It was obvious that what they were taking into the game was not sunscreen. Suddenly the guard asked me if I was with them and I was scared and just said yes, and he took my sunscreen too. That day would end with my face getting very red on only one side and a very angry mother when I came home that day. Overall, I loved the day up at Happy Valley and it helped me decide that this was the college for me.