Day Twenty Six ~ Tuesday, May 21

Last Field Journal Entry!! Wow, it’s been a big month. Today is our last full day together, and tonight we will celebrate with OP Closing Ceremonies. We left Italy in the late morning. We left about 11, to catch an 11:45 bus. Like the last one, it arrived a little late.
We packed our bags, jumped on, went through a tunnel for 15 minutes, and were back in Chamonix, France. The convenient thing about our stay this time is we got a hotel right next to the bus stop, so that we wouldn’t have to worry as much about catching the bus on time tomorrow.
A relatively small lunch was bought, so that people who didn’t want to pay for a personal lunch could eat, and others could still go out and buy lunch. Town time lasted from 1 to 3, because then final day activities started at that point. In that time I did a bit of writing and a lot of thinking.
Then 3 p.m. rolled around, and it was time to sit down and do some evaluating. We had four evaluations to write: the Redlands CAS instructor evaluation, a written instructor evaluation for each instructor, and a written personal evaluation as a student. I only finished the first of the four, and started on the personal eval before we had to reconvene at 4:15.
At that point, we started the normal evening meeting, and because we had to recap our entire month, got to dinner around 5:45. It was another Italian restaurant, which was quite good, but didn’t quite have the portion sizes that we were used to in Italy! After a couple hours there, we made our way back to the hotel for our final evening program.
The whole thing lasted about 6 hours, and everyone had a lot said about them. It was quite a special night.

And that’s the field journal. It’s been about a month since I started writing in this thing. In that time I have recorded moments of frustration and of joy, of exhaustion and beauty that has struck me speechless. I have gone from taking a plane ride with near strangers to telling people to their face how they’ve made a difference in my life in just 26 days.
That is what Europe has been.

-Joseph Bruner