Day two: Cox Arboretum
Now that we've gotten into the flow of things, I'm really starting to enjoy this STEMmersion.
We started the day by creating a haigu individually. A haigu is a haiku put over the picture it's based on. There are a couple ways to make a haigu. I chose to make a haiku first and find a matching image after it is written. I ended up writing mine about a sunrise over a forest because I like the way sunrises look and this STEMmersion is all about the woods.
Focusing on the sunrise, I think it is a good representation of our world coming to life. The vibrant colors you sometimes get are also really nice to look at, and they contrast with the darker colors of the landscape really well. See my haigu below!
After we made our haigu, we prepared for our field trip to Cox Arboretum, which hosts many types of plants and animals. Ironically, the weather wasn't great today and it rained a lot. The field trip was pretty "free-range" in the sense that we were allowed to roam the park in small groups and basically do as we pleased as long as we followed some simple rules. I stuck with two of my friends, Connor and Tomas, for most of the trip. Once it had stopped raining so heavily, we walked to the park's Edible landscape. This area had a variety of edible plants which we were free to pick from if we chose to. I ate an oregano leaf, and Tomas spent most of the trip carrying around a green onion he picked there.
Next, we ate our lunches and traveled to the Tree Tower, a wooden tower that was about 40-50 feet tall if I remember correctly. The view was nice, but I'm actually kind of afraid of heights, so I didn't want to stay up there for too long. The view was nice though, and I got some good pictures out of it, which you can see below.
After that, me and Connor hiked one of the trails they had there. The distance was about a mile, and it rained on and off during the hike. Despite all that, I definitely had fun. I took lots of photos, too many to put here, so I will make a photo gallery and link it here. The trail eventually looped back to where we started, so we met back up with Tomas and waited inside the main park building until it was time to leave.