The Wizard!

I survived the trip! Once again our team did exceptionally well.

Leah - 4th in the plant i.d.
Darin - 3rd in the plant i.d. and 3rd in the combined score
Tanner - 1st in the written
Me - 6th in the plant i.d. and 2nd in the combined score
Team - 2nd in the plant i.d. and 2nd in the written

So I did better than I did last year! I wasn't quite top 5 in the plants, but I'm still happy with how well I did. I won $400 and a week long trip around western Canada to look at pretty much anything range-related that I want! I'm excited for that! I want to see the Tall Grass Prairie in Manitoba and some of the stuff that NCC is doing in the Kootenays for sure.

I gambled some money in Reno and made $12 off the slots (yay!) and then lost $20 on the craps table - very sad. So I came away with a net loss, but it was entertaining to watch some of the "lifers" at the slot machines. There were a lot of old ladies that sat there with buckets of quarters and talked to the machine when they pulled the handle down. There was even one lady wearing a pair of kid's fairy wings. Very strange.

On Thursday instead of going on a tour for the conference I spent some of the money that I won and bought a lift ticket and rented a board at Squaw Valley, CA. It was an hour bus ride there, and compared to AB standards the snow was pretty terrible, but it was worth it because I can say that I went snowboarding at Lake Tahoe in CA! The weather was great, and it was fantastic to see the terrain of the Sierra Nevadas - very different than the Rockies. We also saw plants that we learned for the competition, but never thought we would ever see! That was exciting enough that Travis and I picked some branches and wore them in our helmets for the day! We looked like two moose (mooses? mice? meece?).

The downhill pose

We found Ceanothus velutinus and Arctostaphylos pungens, so naturally I had to put them in my helmet

The girls on the summit

The trip to San Diego was good and bad, but mostly good. On Saturday four of us loaded up and went to 6 Flags as planned. It was a great day! I had a riot riding all the coasters. My two favorites were Riddler's Revenge (you stand up!) and Tatsu (you fly like Superman!). Things were going great until the end of the day when I started to feel a little sick to my stomach. I elected to skip the last coaster in favor of not vomiting. I didn't know that I was only postponing the inevitable.

On the way back to San Diego I kept feeling worse and worse until, on the side of the I-5 in the middle of L.A., we had to stop so I could throw up on the small triangle of no man's land between the freeway and an on-ramp. It was not fun and I haven't been that scared in a long time. The hour that it took to get home was the longest and worst of my life because we kept having to stop for me. When we finally got back to San Diego I tried to sleep but couldn't. I was in really rough shape and ended up going to the hospital. After a CT scan of my abdomen, two bags of i.v. saline, a shot of morphine for the pain and some anti-nausea drugs, the doctor concluded that I might have food poisoning. I went home at 5:30 am feeling like I had been hit by a city bus.

Found out the next day that Darin and Vicki were sick that night and then Tianna was sick the next day - so now we don't think it was food poisoning cause we all ate different things in the 24 hours before we all got sick. Weird. Maybe it was something in the water.

Once we recovered, the rest of the trip was fun. We went to Legoland (!!!), the Wild Animal Park, and the San Diego Zoo, which is my new favorite place! I was thrilled to see Galapagos tortoises, a pygmy hippo, and thousands of exotic birds. At 6:30 on the morning that we left, Tianna and I went to the beach to say that we had been to the beach in CA.

Posing with some famous person at Legoland

All in all it was a great trip. Met some crazy and fun people from Texas, got duct taped to myself and a stolen road pylon, snowboarded in CA, ate a turkey leg as long as my forearm and bigger around than my bicep (I blame the Texans for me eating it), threw up on the interstate three times (happy birthday to me and goodbye turkey leg), had some very fine southern CA cuisine, stayed in a house that is worth 1.5 million big ones, held my own on the I-5 during rush hour, and took about a billion pictures.