Last Friday, we packed our bags and left the house right after school with the animals under the care of Lisa’s friend Laura. We piled into the car for a six hour drive through the mountains and to the northern coast. Flying was not an option, considering the weather would send us bumping and swirling and leave us sick to our stomachs. Yet driving was not the most pleasant thing in the world. Traffic was bad and impatience brought tension throughout the car so most of us zoned out, listening to our iPods and read our books. We grabbed dinner at 
and continued on our way, stomachs filled with the traditional American fast food: burgers. When we finally arrived at the hotel it was late and we were all exhausted, we trooped up to our rooms and had some microwave pizza and then we slept soundly till morning.
We drove into Arcata around nine in the morning and had till noon to tour the town. Arcata is smaller than Rocklin and is surrounded by towering redwoods. It was a cloudy day but it wasn’t raining as we had expected. We walked around, saw a mural on a wall that basically told the story of Arcata life, basically recycle, recycle, recycle. We noticed that there were no major corporations in town, no Starbucks or Safeway to be seen, just the local stuff. We went inside a gift shop where the heavy smell of incense filled the air. It was clear by some of the items being sold that Arcata is very much on the left side of the political scale. We went outside again and walked into a book shop; it was filled with books and had some interesting nonfiction titles that pulled at my interest. It was getting close to noon, when we had to be at the campus so we got some lunch and headed in that direction.
We departed on our tour with a guide who was very enthusiastic about his school. He was from San Diego and had wanted to go somewhere cooler for college. It is not a super large campus and it is filled with trees. The forestry classes really don’t even have a classroom; they just spend it outside, scaling trees hundreds of feet high. Nature was clearly the main focus of the school, although they have a good business program. Their Anthropology majors go to Costa Rica to study primates and study abroad is a very clear option. A lot of their students continue on to Peace Corps after graduation and they have a graduation pledge stating “I pledge to explore and take into account the social and environmental consequences of any job I consider and will try to improve these aspects of any organizations for which I work.” They were the first university to take on a pledge like this and I find it very honorable. The dorms however, gave off the feeling of a prison and were not very inviting. On the other hand, the student apartments were more comfortable and seemed like a place I could live. One of the apartment complexes is actually in the middle of the forest, surrounded by trees and is not even visible from the main campus. The campus is overall beautiful and is filled with nature and is really in the middle of nowhere, with camping, hiking, and surfing not even an hour away.
After the tour we drove to the beach and left the twins in the car while we walked to the beach. The waves were huge and I felt like I was standing at the edge of the world, breathing in forest and sea air all at the same time. It was beautiful.
