As the 6th week of our internship winds to a close it’s becoming more and more apparent that the summer is coming to an end. Tourism is slowing down a little bit. It’s the calm before the leaf peeper storm. Back to school ads are on TV and we’re all preparing to head off to college. This week was an eventful one. We started off at Faulkner Park working with the VYCC crew to build a universally accessible trail. We shoveled gravel, moved rocks for cribbing, and smoothed the trail to “make the grade”. In order to be ADA compliant the trail has to follow certain guidelines of pitch and steepness. Making the trail compliant involves a lot of raking and measuring with a level.
Wednesday we went to visit the SCA headquarters with Hali and Bridget, two other SCA interns at the park. We started off with a tour of the grounds and all of their cool, environmentally friendly buildings. We then sat and talked with a panel of about 5 employees about their experiences with the SCA. It was great to make contact with these people who will, hopefully, be helpful somewhere along the line. They fed us pizza and we got to talk one-on-one with some of the employees. After walking around the trails and doing a leadership activity, the SCA treated us to ice cream. Having been wined and dined or rather ice creamed and pizzaed the day before, coming back to being normal interns at the park was a slight letdown. We split off in the morning to work on our individual projects then went back to work on the Faulkner Trail in the afternoon. We shoveled what seemed like a full ton of gravel and brought it up the hill in wheelbarrows and a track-hauler (a motorized wheelbarrow).
On Friday Dylan and I roved in the morning and had a lovely conversation with a 90 year old woman and her friend out for a hike on the trails. It was nice to really connect with the visitors in a way that we don’t always get to. We were both very impressed by the woman’s agility and hope that when we’re 90, we can still make it up to the Pogue to chat with some interns. In the afternoon I handed out surveys and sat at the Billings Farm Desk. Saturday I spent a leisurely morning at the Chamber Booth on the Green reading because not that many people came by. I spent the rest of the afternoon at Billings Farm. Looking forward to SummerFest next weekend and all the good food!