Today the conference starts.

Can you sense my nervousness?

Yes, I’ve already met a lot of people. Yes, they’ve been the nicest people I’ve ever met. Am I still scared?

You bet I am.

I’m one of the newbies! One of the ones that don’t know where everything is (although coming down two days before the conference starts has helped). I know like, two people. Situations like this are really scary for me! I like the comfortable feeling of knowing people in big gatherings. It doesn’t help that the one person I know really well is the darn director of this whole conference!

I know that I am supposed to be here. I know that I’m going to learn so much. And I know that me pushing myself out of my comfort zone like this is going to be a great thing for me. So hold on CB, get ready for a crazy ride.

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Yesterday, I did a lot of exploring.

Okay, let’s be honest. I’ve done a lot of exploring pretty much every day I’ve been down here. But yesterday was a big one!

After church, (which was freaking amazing, there was a trumpet player from the Met Opera orchestra playing all the descants, cue melted heart), I decided to break off from the group of early birds and get some blogging done.

(If you haven’t already read it, you can check out the link to the first post in this series here.)

I grabbed some lunch at Hogwarts, meandered into the bookstore, bought matching shirts for me and my boyfriend. Yes, I am that dorky. Then a group of us went into town for snackies!!!!

The grocery store here is called Piggly Wiggly. Pretty cute, eh? All I walked out with was a bag of white cheddar popcorn, some frosting, and Nilla Wafers. I could have gotten healtier snacks, but heck, I’m living in a dorm, why not eat like a college student too. But then, we went into a store called Mountain Outfitters. Anyone who knows me knows that this is my kind of store. CAMPING WEAR AND GEAR GALORE. It took everything in me not to walk out of there as the proud owner of a new Patagonia three-quarter zip up in army green that was MEGA on sale. (Don’t worry Mom, it didn’t happen, they only had smalls). But it was for sure tempting.

Then the real adventures began.

We visited the local convent up here. And let me tell you, it’s beautiful and not at all what I expected it to look like. I guess I don’t really know what I expected, but that was not it. I was too busy taking it all in to take any pictures. But I did manage to get a picture of me at the retreat center that’s just a bit down the road from the convent.

To finish off our trip of exploring, we visited Templeton Library. The legends say that when the building was first built, a couple of teenagers decided it would be fun to go up on the hill it’s on after dark and get drunk. When they went inside to play around, one of the boys decided to go down a hole they assumed was a laundry chute. Turns out, it was actually a garbage disposal. When he slid down, the machine turned on and crushed him. He was able to yell up to the others and warn them not to come down, but he eventually died.

Creepy right?

The building is actually huge and very beautiful. But the creepy kind of beautiful. And not just cause of that story.

My night ended by walking down to the dining hall with my sweet, sweet roommate. We chatted and laughed the whole way there, not realizing that it was way past dinner time. When we got to the dining hall, it was closed. So we trecked back the mile it takes to walk back to Quintard Hall and ate snacks for dinner.

What a life.

Again today I am just shown that this is God’s handiwork. The views, the people, the amazing community here.

They don’t call this the Holy Mountain for nothin’.