Kansas to Cambridge: The Elusive Moose

Since The Bucket List came out about 8 years ago, I have been working on my own bucket list. It is a varied and occasionally ambitious list and my goal for the weekend was to cross one of my favorite line items off, see a moose.

For the moose hunt, I headed to Vermont with a few other LGOs and SOs for a labor day weekend adventure.

The whole group on top of the mountain at sunset

We started our hunt at the local farmers market where we picked up food for dinner and saw the shiniest red onions I have ever seen plus some purple peppers (peter piper picked a peck of purple peppers??). Then it was on to Warren Falls. This hidden gem is a series of rock formations with deep pools of water in between them perfect for cliff jumping or sliding. My favorite was the rock that actually worked as a slide. It started to get crowded so it was time to move on to Blueberry lake.

We didn't see the elusive moose on day 1, but we did discover a new word. Ever been at a loss for words when you see a cute little dog? Call them a "smoopie". It works every time!

After an active day 1, we had more of a "fat kid" day 2. We started with the "Vermonster" at Ben and Jerrys. Then bought a couple months of cheese at the Cabot store. After balking at the prices when I first moved to Boston, it was refreshing to see such a good value. We got three pounds of cheese for the cost of one pound at our local grocery store. We also got to experience the famed Heady Topper from Alchemist Brewery. While IPAs are not my go to (except Harpoon) I liked it and would recommend stopping there in the future.

By far the most photogenic part of the trip was the sunset hike up along the Long Trail to a scenic overlook of the valley and a beautiful sunset (pictured) above. At this point we gave up on the moose hunt and just assumed that there was one somewhere in the valley below. This all sounds great, but if you are like me and not an experienced as a hiker (Kansas it pretty darn flat), I was nervous about the climb down. It was full of rocks, tree branch steps, and places to slip and now you are telling me I have to go down in the DARK! What I didn't realize was how much faster it was to go down hill rather than up.

Sunset hike on the Long Trail in Vermont (spoiler, this is the best photo in this post)

All too soon it was time to head home, unfortunately without ever seeing a moose. Labor Day weekend was a break between orientation and the first week of classes. Orientation was four days of getting to know our class, our ocean (cohort), our teams, and Sloan overall. There is a push during orientation to also get exposed to all that MIT overall has to offer.

Now that I know my ocean and team (Pacific Terns) it is time to get back into the swing of things. Like the LGO teams, the Sloan Core teams are diverse across industry, geography, ambitions, and most anything they can measure and account for in a team. My team is from China, Brazil, France, Hawaii, Texas, Connecticut, and Texas. They have been everything from consultants, public policy advisers, fashion marketing, and software programmers. It is fun learning about everyone's background and goals. Also fun because as an LGO we don't take the Data, Models, and Decisions (DMD) class with the rest of the core. The rest of my team is stressing about the first case write up of the semester which gives me time to get my engineering classes figured out while they are all busy.

So it is back to reality and a full course load. Updates on the semester coming soon.