Media Blog

My life has been a complete whirlwind since school has started, and I have barely had a free moment to update my blog. It’s been approximately three months (90 days) since my last blog post so I will attempt to describe the highlights of my life since then in 90 words or less.  Beginning….Now

 Where to begin? RA training was somewhat useful, but mostly all it did was stress me out and make me really nervous. BUT so far I have loved being an RA. My floor is great, and I have the best, most awesome staff anyone could ever ask for. My friend Nga from Germany that I haven’t seen for two years came for a visit with Addison and Lanie. I find all my classes really interesting [although I find that a test every other week in sociology is super annoying (Ok, that’s 90 words, but I’m going to keep going even though I totally failed) and obnoxious], and the grades are holding up. The Razorbacks are having a dismal season, but good news: the Dolphins are 3-3 and are in a four way tie for first place in the AFC East! I have to say I am very happy with the way Ryan Tannehill has played (I admit I had very low expectations), but I think he’s the future of the franchise! I went to the annual KC Chief’s game at Arrowhead with dad and Uncle Rick. The Chief’s played so bad they made the Razorbacks look good, but it was still fun. Hmm what else? The Traveler has kept me busy, but I think I’m starting to get the hang of it! Celebrated two months with the boyfriend, J saw Andy Grammer in concert for the second time, turned 20….

Other stuff coming up…

I’m planning a couple of programs for my floor which have also kept me busy, the first GOLAC is coming up as well as my first 5k (The Color Run) in Little Rock. I’m also going to be helping a lot with homecoming festivities here in Holcombe. Holcombe and Futrall won last year, so I hope to help continue the tradition!

So that’s basically the highlights, maybe there’s more and I just forgot about them, but this will have to do until I get more time to blog!

Thursday: We spent Thursday at Cyprus Gardens.  Cyprus Gardens was basically a swamp area that has a ton of cyprus trees and lilly pads growing up out of the water.  We hopped in a boat and started paddling through the swamp.  It was very beautiful.  There were some sections of the water that were completely covered by water lillies; there had to be hundreds of them.  The trees were so tall and shot straight up out of the water.  Scenes from The Notebook and The Patriot were shot in the garden, so Tori and I were really excited about that :) I can’t wait to go back and watch the movies again when I get home. 

Friday: Friday we went to Boone Hall Plantation.  The entrance by far was the best part.  It’s called the Avenue of Oaks, and on either side of the driveway are huge oak trees that have Spanish moss hanging from the branches.  There are almost 100 oak trees total along the driveway.  This avenue inspired the entrance to 12 Oaks in the movie Gone With the Wind.  Boone Hall was also unique in the fact that it had original slave cabins (most were destroyed during the Civil War) from before the 1800’s.  It’s also been used several time for films, most notably The Notebook. :)  The house was gorgeous, and the grounds and gardens were beautiful.  This was by far my favorite one to visit.   

Saturday: Today we went to the Isle of Palms Beach for some swimming and para-sailing.  It was an absolutely gorgeous day: warm, clear skies, and a cool, gentle breeze.  As soon as I got on the beach I thought it looked similar to the beach in the movie Dear John, and as it turns out, it was! Tori was so excited that Channing Tatum had once been there.  She’s completely crazy about him! We swam on the beach for a while and broke out the boogie boards again before going para-sailing.  The crew took us out into the ocean on a small boat and then strapped us up onto the parachute.  We went 800 ft. up into the air and had a perfect view of Charleston Harbor and the city. I secretly wanted to just jump out of my harness and into the water below.  It was a ton of fun being up that high! When we finally came back down, we headed back to the dock where we saw 5-6 dolphins swimming around.  Overall, it was a great end to our vacation.   

Monday: We went to two antebellum plantations on Monday.  I went in with preconceived ideas of what it would be like from movies like Gone With the Wind. I absolutely LOVE that movie, but I came to see that it wasn’t exactly historically accurate (I should have know Hollywood would have changed it).  There was certainly a ton of land, but the homes weren’t all that big.  The homes weren’t as big as I expected, but still really beautiful.  The first one we went to was Middleton Place.  The original plantation was burned down by the Union Army during the Civil War, but it was restored to what it would have looked like during the 1800’s.  The ruins of the original house can still be seen though.  The gardens were absolutely beautiful; they say that these are the oldest landscape gardens in America today.  There were French styled gardens, a cyprus swamp, rice fields, and pine forests.  We even saw an alligator coming up out of the swamp!  The second plantations was Drayton Hall.  This one was an unfurnished, unrestored, and original.  It was saved from destruction by the Union because the owner placed yellow flags outside the entrance signaling a small pox hospital.  The trick was enough to get the Union to walk on by rather than risk getting sick while destroying the house.  Out of the 150 plantations that were once in Charleston, only about 20 remain, and only 4 are open to the public.  

Tuesday: Pretty much all we did yesterday was tour a bunch of historic houses.  George Washington even stayed in one that we visited.  I’m just about ready to pack up and move to Charleston because the houses here are positively gorgeous.  They’re all tall and skinny and painted bright colors like pink, purple, yellow, and blue.  My favorite feature on the houses are what they call piazzas which are two double porches (one on the ground level and one on the second level).  I am most definitely going to have a piazza on my house someday!  All of the buildings were original, but the inside was restored to look like the original.  The typical structure is to have business and plain rooms on the first floor, but the really elaborate rooms for entertaining guests were on the second floor.  A lot of them had free standing spiral staircases too.  I wish they made houses like this today; they were so detailed and beautiful! 

Wednesday: It rained all day today :( Surprisingly, the streets were flooded after only maybe 30 minutes of hard rain!  It was so difficult trying to navigate our way around town.  To stay dry we decided to go to the slave mart, which is an original building where slaves were sold during the years prior to the Civil War.  The downstaris had been restored, and upstairs there was a museum.  We also did quite a bit of shopping!  I am always up for shopping, but bad news: I spent all my money. I have about $11 left to spend for the rest of the trip, and it’s only Wednesday! 

Random piece of exciting news that I found out today: Dan Marino (best quarterback in Miami Dolphin history, and, as we say in the Dunaway house, best quarterback that ever played the game) lives right outside of Charleston!!!! If I just happened to see him out and about somewhere I could die a happy person!  

So I haven’t done a very good job of blogging over this trip, but I’m going to attempt to shortly describe some of the things I’ve done over the last couple days.

Saturday: After getting up so early on Friday (2:30 A.M.) to make it to the airport on time, we all decided that the morning would be saved for sleeping in!  When we finally got up and around (around noon) we settled on taking a tour of Ft. Sumter.  Ft. Sumter is on a man made island in the Charleston Harbor and is only accessible by boat.  The fort is famous for being the site of the first battle of the Civil War.  During the battle, the Confederate army bombed the fort and the severly outnumbered Union Army within, until they surrender after 34 hours. The fort remained an important site throughout the war, and it was later recaptured by the Union Army.  Today, the once 3 story fort has only one wall remaining, the rest were destroyed in a bombardment by the Union army.  Rubble can still be seen both inside and outside the fort; there are even still some shells stuck in the walls.  Being a big time history nerd, I really enjoyed getting to see it, and I thought it was a lot of fun :)

Sunday: This was our beach day, and we drove up to Myrtle Beach to meet Sam and his cousin Caleb for the day.  We spent the later part of the morning walking the boardwalk and going into some beach and surf shops. Ater grabbing some lunch we headed down to the beach.  The waves were huge which made it a ton of fun for body surfing and jumping waves.  However, there was one problem: the sand in the water was really coarse and made all of us REALLY itchy.  It was kind of unbearable, and all of us were pretty miserable.  We failed to find any showers close by, so we walked maybe half a mile down the beach (trying really hard not to scratch) until we found a pool where we could rinse off.  The pool was technically for paying guests only, but the gate was open, so we snuck in anyway.  By that point, we were so uncomfortable we would have done anything to get rinsed off.  After our dip in the pool, we headed back out to the ocean where my dad had bought us some boogie boards.  Those were perfect for riding the waves.  The sand still gave us some trouble, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as before.  While I was riding a wave into the shore, the sand was so coarse, that as my arm rubbed up against it, it left a long bloody gash all the way down from my wrist to my elbow.  It kind of hurt actually, so I ditched the board and went to lay out for a while.  Late in the afternoon we went banana boating which was so much fun! Like I said, the waves were really big, so we got some serious air! Caleb was the only who didn’t fall off.   I’m a serious wimp and fell off twice, but Tori was the first one to go, so I didn’t feel quite so wimpy.  Banana boating is hard work! I was sore from trying to hang on, but it was a lot of fun, and we all had a good time! It was so awesome getting to see Sam and Caleb at the beach and getting to spend time with them! :)