KELLIE'S BLOG!!!!!!!!!!‏

Today was our last day of work on our trail, and we thought it would be just like any other day of work until Doug whipped out his guitar in the parking lot/stretch circle area and started serenading the crew before stretch circle. Surprise #1. After Doug's interesting rendition of a Bright Eyes song, which only Casey may have fully enjoyed, complete with guitar AND vocals, we did our stretch circle. A game on ninja followed that, along with Rex suddenly blasting the Pina Colada song from Rose's van and some interesting old man dancing from Bryan and Doug. Being sufficiently woken up by all the surprise music and dancing, we headed to our trail. Once there, Doug shared Surprise #2 with us during snack time. It was his old decrepit book of 101 elephant jokes. I'd say about 99% of them didn't even make sense, but they provided some nice entertainment for the crew. (Such as: How do you carve an elephant? You get a rock and you chisel away all the pieces that don't look like an elephant.) We got right to work after snack debarking, putting in checksteps, and working on drainage dips. Amazingly, Casey finished debarking her "baby" (a log she'd been working on debarking for almost a day) and Bryan and I had the honor of setting it after Casey had a nice photoshoot with it. Pretty soon, all the checksteps were set; 17 in total, which is 17 more than were originally there. The checksteps look awesome and make walking on the trail so much easier. The drainage dips we did also look great. Before the day ended, we hiked through our first trail and got to survey our old work. Near the end we tag team polaskied a fallen tree/step that was an obstacle in the trail and got through it in record time. It was awesome. When we got to the bottom of our hike, Rose had to shuttle half of us to the parking lot and then come back because we didn't have both vans, so when she left with half the kids, the other half of us hid in the grasses and had Doug convince her that we were all missing when she came back. It would have been great, except then Doug also convinced her that she should just drive off without us, so we had to come out of hiding once we saw the van pulling away. All in all, it was an exceptional last day of work, and now we can look forward to our ice cream treat tomorrow!!!