Friday, June 19 – Day 6, Part 1 Training

Final Day of Training at Mt. Rainier!

I helped with breakfast preparation this morning! It was a lot of fun to slice up some fresh fruit for the breakfast buffet. Mary, our chef, hails from a background of pretty neat-sounding scientific molecular biology studies. For over two decades she's been a professional chef and storyteller. As I sliced honeydew and cantaloupe, she told me a neat story about her interactions with one of her German professors for Reproductive Biology from when she was in school. The content of the story was “those things which we do not discuss.” Therefore, I will keep the topic as such and move on to other items in this post.

More training ensued as the day progressed from breakfast to lunch. It's hard to believe the week is almost over! We leave for the airport tomorrow morning at 10:00am! I'll spend just enough time in the airport to check-in and find my gate before I board my plane around 1:00pm. I should get home just before midnight if all goes well! Then, I'll frantically do all of my laundry from this week and pack for the Virgin Islands before departing a few hours later. I'm thinking I need to pack more shorts than originally planned. I've been very cold during this time in the Northwest, but the expected temperatures in the VIIS are more in the high 90's than the low 40's and 50's we've had at Rainier. Mid to high 90's should definitely be shorts-worthy.

Fade to black...we ate a lunch full of leftovers and freshly baked sourdough bread. Tasty.

We are ahead of schedule for the training and could possibly finish everything today, thus having quite a bit of free time tomorrow. It would be awesome if tomorrow's extra free time could somehow turn into a short trip to Seattle before getting to the airport. I've started packing and preparing for departure. The long 8+ hours of fly-time home is super soon. Doing more hiking here on the mountain would be sweet, so hopefully, if not tomorrow, I can come back sometime and check out more of the hiking.