Baton Rouge misses you all, she told me 😁

    Hey nerds, hope y'all are doing well and adjusting into your new homes. It's been different not seeing you guys everyday, I miss the camaraderie and the company that school brings. Anyways, I'm starting my third week working for the Office of State Parks and I am thoroughly enjoying it. The atmosphere of downtown is really historic and it makes me feel very important, almost like I'm a politician. I even had to get a badge to let me into my building which I quickly found out gives me access to every building downtown, even the capitol. The type of work we do in my office is more of organizing inventory in the parks and figuring out what maintenance needs to be done and what amount of money we need to ask the state for in order to see proper repairs done. We also go on a lot of site visits, at least once a week. The site visits are either to see what issues there are or to look at the site and talk about potential new projects for the parks. The type of projects that we would work on would either be some type of building or campsite renovations/installations or trail or road renovations/installations. What I love most about my job is that they do not see me as an intern that is there to complete the unwanted work but rather as someone they want to teach about the inner workings of how State Parks function and how landscape architecture and our projects bring people to nature. I have yet to work on AutoCAD which I am very thankful for. The first week I was here, one of my coworkers invited me on an outing to the capitol to show me around and we went to the top which, surprisingly, I had never done before. It was an amazing view of all of Baton Rouge, I'll attach a picture. Last week, my second week, we took a site visit to Tunica Hills (where Charlie took us on a field trip) to discuss a possible project out there. It happened to be one of the rainiest days of the season which you can only imagine in all that clay how things turned out. We had 2 four wheelers and 2 side-by-sides with 10 people. As soon as we got to the top of the bluff (which is about a 10-20 minute ride through the park) it started pouring which caused the side-by-sides to get stuck in the mud as we were trying to climb the hills to get out of there. My coworkers and I were slipping and falling down every hill we hiked but it was a great time with lots of laughing. What was supposed to be a 2-3 hour excursion turned into a 5-6 hour attempt at getting out of there. All in all, I am having a great time and am holding down the fort till you guys come back.

 -Julia :)

       This is an old Civil War tunnel that's at Tunica, I think they said it was part of an old train system

                                                                    More Tunica Pics

                                 This is at the top of the bluff with a view of the Mississippi River

                                                The view from the top of the State Capitol