America's love affair with gasoline and the automobile

Jess, Jeff (my fellow interns) and I went to a route 66 festival in amarillo, tx which is about an hour away from borger. some restaurants were having a route 66 special in which, if you bought a 5 dollar wristband, you were able to purchase an item at the cost people would pay back when route 66 was a very popular highway for travelers. we enjoyed 15 cent hotdogs and 75 cent chili! I also got cantaloupe flavored gellato. 

Jess is an avid horse rider but she is also really into cars and motorcycles (she has a motorcycle license and used to drive a harley). some of the cars were cool shapes but it was cute seeing how excited she got over each car!

I thought this one looked like a dildo :D

this one was my favorite! 

Below is a trip we took a week or so ago to an outdoor art display.. of about 10 cadillacs stuck halfway into the ground and covered in graffiti.... i don't think it was very interesting per se, but i enjoyed tagging the cars with my name :D

that was a bit of a flashback... back to today BEFORE the car show!

sleepy eva watching the cars pass on the way to amarillo

 went to an antique shop.... and i ended up buying a piece of vintage luggage... dont make fun but i absolutely adore it! XP

Also I dont know if you read in the last blurb that i had got a really cheap pair of leather boots to combat all of the spikey cacti and shit i was walking through.. bc i was pulling thorns and shit out of my brand new trainers that i bought for hiking here.... well funny story about those shoes....

here are the boots right when i bought them... and i was so happy because they were so cheap! less than 2.50!

well sometimes you get what you pay for.... although the shoes were holding up against thorns and such i suppose the glue that held the shoes together was poorly done (which may or may not be why they were donated to the salvation army). and the bottoms of the shoes fell off completely and we had to tape them up so i could continue through the rest of the day... it is hilarious now but at the time i was really mad!

First week in borger,tx working at lake Meredith National Recreation Area

I'm kindof sick of explaining to people what I'm doing out here. I sort of have the explanation down to a few sentences now. I'm working for the Department of the Interior--> National Parks Service. My main stay is here in Borger working at the Lake Meredith Fire Cache. The main people at the fire cache are the NPS Southern Plains Fire Group. They are called if there is a danger of wildfires spreading across the national park (but they cannot interfere with structural fires -- which are handled by local firefighters. They also implement prescribed burns. The fire group people are really intense dudes, and i suppose the major drought that the area has been experiencing has only made their jobs more stressful.

SOOOOOO my group is the research component to the fire cache here. they are preforming a long term ecological research (LTER) study which is monitoring a random sample of burn sites to assess the species diversity, and frequency of the plants that are appearing as the land experiences varying degrees of succession. so my group is going to be in lake meredith identifying grasses and shrubs and playing with GPS receivers for the next week or so until we travel to the next site which should be somewhere in Oklahoma. 

such good looking interns... hahhaa

Saw an antelopeee!

almost half the price of cigarettes in comparison to nyc. 

i like to take classy photos of the kids i'm working with

russian thistle which turns into tumble weed

huge beatle landed on my arm

alibates flint

our NPS tourgide for the alibates flint quarry 

so many oil refineries 

walking through a dried-up lake

I didnt get any pictures but i've already seen a rattlesnake here... i got a pair of boots to protect from the snakes, tics, chiggers, and cacti for $2.17 at salvo!