The Final Days

I can’t believe The Quest is over. Like, over. I am sitting in the airport (even though I don’t leave until tomorrow) and it literally feels like I blinked and it was over. Where did those 3 months go? Up until today it has felt like it was going by fast but that we had been here forever, but today it literally feels like we just got here. What is going on?!

We finished our DRP’s and all our presentations went well. My paper ended up being 73 pages. 73 PAGES! Holy crap. Granted, a lot of it was results figures and tables or site maps, but still. I haven’t had a paper that long before, unfortunately I will have papers much longer than that coming my way eventually. Boo. I realized I never mentioned what all the different projects were. Mine was marine debris; we were looking at quantity, type, sources and spatial distribution of debris around the Firth. It was cool, we got some interesting results. There was and education team that worked with the Kaiaua Primary School making a module for a 10 week environmental sustainability program. Frogs, inverts and birds were the lucky ones with traveling to cool places but they seemed to be pretty intense. The frog group wadded through streams counting frogs that were the size of a fingernail. Inverts and birds basically did surveys of quantity and type of animals present in their sites. All of them were pretty cool especially since they all were helping in one way or another.

Our final days were really awesome/sad/surreal. The days following our presentations were filled with group activities and such. They were definitely all about the ‘final group moments’, which is good, but definitely hard to deal with at times. Wednesday night they took us to the Miranda hot pools. So relaxing, I can’t believe we hadn’t gone there before; it was literally 10 km down the road. It was literally a cement pool that has water heated by natural hot springs, pretty awesome. Smelled a little of sulfur, but that’s ok. Definitely not like the smell of Rotorua. They also had us make a card type thing that everyone signed or wrote messages on, exactly like a yearbook. It brought me back to high school, haha. We went to a nice beach on Thursday, ate lunch and played a few games. I think that’s when it hit me that we were leaving, sadness! That night was really awesome though. The staff collected and painted small rocks for all of us and each of them took turns telling a story or memory about everyone. SO CUTE! Liz told mine and it was fabulous. She told a story from Leigh when I saved Ian’s weight belt. She was really good at making it dramatic and awesome, haha. I love Liz! She’s going to come visit me in Australia!!! SO EXCITED! Anyways, it was really great that they did that. We also had a fire that night where we sat around and went through memories and such. Basically a cry fest for myself and a few others. It was a good time though. :)

This morning was a bit rough. We all stood in a circle and Jono and Ria spoke to us. I was doing well considering 10 of the girls were crying, but right when we started saying goodbye to some of the staff and students we weren’t going to see at the airport, I was toast. Definitely sunk in that it was over. Then I started thinking about everything being ‘the last time this..the last time that’. Sad sad sad. Its ok though, we will definitely find a way to see everyone again and if I have anything to do with it, I will be back here in a flash. No doubt about that. If anyone is headed this way, let me know and ill tell you where you should definitely go and what you should do.

About a week ago a few people decided to put everyone into 'Questwarts houses' like Hogwarts...special I know. It was hysterical though. One kid decided to make an EcoQuest jeopardy. It was so awesome. We all dressed in our house colors and he had a ton of questions relating to the Quest. It was complete with both Harry Potter AND Jeopardy music. So much fun!! Gryfindor won though...booooo. They got 2 of the 3 double jeopardys though..not fair. Even Ria and Jono (main directors at EcoQuest) came and dressed up, it was great.

I am leaving for Australia tomorrow, ahhhh. I will describe more about it later as I have a limited amount of internet right now and should stop blabbering on.

Fun Fact:
New Zealand commercials are hysterically non-relevant to the item the commercial is for. Also, there is an epic NZ soap opera called Shortland Street. Worst acting ever. hahaha