Day #1

As I posted earlier, I woke up to the sunset on star rock...beautiful!!!
Unfortunately though it was two hours before breakfast and we didn't have our stuff until we unloaded the U-haul after breakfast. So we just walked around and explored the campus.
Then after breakfast we started an assembly line to unload the U-haul! It was great to see everyone helping everyone. It was also great to finally get all my things and to be able to unpack. :)
After lunch we did some group bonding activities. These included a campus wide scavenger hunt (which my group won :), rock climbing then breaking into smaller groups and doing team exercises on the ropes course. It was so much fun! It was so neat to have everyone so open to working together even in the difficult times. God has brought together an amazing group of students! I am getting excited to become even closer with them then I have in just this one day!
(There is so much that we did so I am sure I am missing something amazing!)
For dinner we had a banquet, which was formal as a way to say goodbye to good looks for the next three months (crazy!) and it was also where we met all of our professors and Emerald Cove staff.
Afterwards we had our very first "community meeting" where we played the famous "name game", which was a lot more fun than I had anticipated along with some other get to know you games. (Normally those games which require reciting things in front of people freak me out) Then we had a prayer time, which was incredible. We all prayed to ourselves then we headed out (in our own time) to star rock where we popcorn prayed as a group. It is amazing to see such a group of student come together before God and give to him all the glory and power for things to come this semester.
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Tonight made me really grasp how real this is. It has been feeling like just summer camp and it has been difficult for me to conceive how long I will be gone from friends and loved ones. I know that in reality it really is a short time, but it feels like it is forever away. I also know that I will have lifelong friends and memories from this experience, but it has just been difficult to grasp that at this point.