The End of Nowhere...

Yesterday, I went to the end of nowhere.  I don't know if you've ever been to the middle of nowhere, but if you keep going passed the middle of nowhere, you reach the end of nowhere.  That's where I went yesterday.  I have a really fun job with the American Red Cross.  One thing I do, is I go all over our chapter and teach health and safety courses to businesses and organizations.  Yesterday, I went with 3 other instructors, and our location was seriously in the end of nowhere.  We drove for an hour to get to this place.  I'm not kidding, the one road that lead out to the location kept going, and going, and going.  I really wondered if we would ever actually get somewhere.  It was quite interesting.

The location we went to is a place that deals with a lot of hazardous material and nuclear crap or something like that.  Basically, it could potentially be a very dangerous workplace if workers are not careful.  I got a little scared by some of the things I saw.  At one point during our class, I got pretty freaked out.  All of the sudden a siren was blaring over the PA system in the complex.  I was about to jump up and book it outside.  But all the employees sat calmly in there chairs as if they had heard nothing at all.  Eventually a voice came over the system explaining that this was just a test of the emergency system.  Thank goodness!

The other thing that feaked me out were the guest day badges that we were given.  One side of them had emergency alert codes and what they meant.  It said what to do if you hear a yellow alert or what to do for some other types of alerts.  One of them was a red alert and it said if you hear that to run away from the location as quickly as possible!  I was scared!  But I guess it made our teaching experience just a little more interesting. 

The best part of the day was after our class was done.  We were teaching very close to where my friend Nate lives.  That means I got to hook up with Nater after class.  We had a little picnic in a park and then took off on a beautiful hike.  We hiked up a peak and was seriously 2.5 miles, straight up to the sky!  It was steep!  But it was great.  The higher we went, the more gorgeous the autumn leaves became.  We also had some amazing views of the valley.  We made it to the top, enjoyed the scenery and the reward of the steep climb up.  We headed back down the mountain, and met up with his family for dinner.  It was one exciting and awesome day!  I'm happy!  Here are some pictures of the hike.  These were taken only about half way up, so you can see how steep/high we climbed.