I love summer...

Today began normal enough. I went in to the hospital at 9am (not super early, but there wasn't any reason to go in earlier). I finally scrubbed in on one of this orthopod's (that's what you call orthopedic surgeons) surgeries. So that was pretty cool, which in laymen's terms means, I basically just held things, applied pressure and held a guy's leg in different positions while the surgeon debrided his necrosed calf, and loved every minute of it... I'm not sure if that's completely normal. Anyway, after that, Dr. Orthopod didn't have any more cases for the day, just some meetings, which he said would be "extremely boring", and advised me to go do some "independent study" for the rest of the day. Which was advice that I took to heart.

Now, I've been thinking about going up there since I moved to South Bend, so it's not completely random, but after I got done in the hospital at about 12:30pm, I decided I would take a trip up to the Indiana Dunes. So I did. (I love summer, it's awesome!) I went to the Indiana Dunes National Lakshore, which is actually a national park, and is only about 50 or 60 miles from where I live. So I drove up there, and hiked around for awhile. Pretty much, the rest of this post is going to be me going thru some pictures that I took up there, so get excited!

The first thing I did was get a map of the place. I went to the visitor's center, and talked to this lady that worked there for awhile (it was kind of weird, not gonna lie, I think she thought I was like 15), and got a map. Then I went to the biggest sand dune they have there.

It's kind of hard to take a picture of a sand dune, but that's it. The biggest one they've got. So I walked around there for a little while, checked things out, and what have you. Then I got a little bored with that, and decided I needed to do some actual hiking, and went down the road to another place.

At the other place, there was an actual trail, and you had to hike about 2 miles or something, through a bog, and some sand dunes and stuff to get to the shore of Lake Michigan. So I did that. Actually it took a long time because I was taking all of these pictures. Also, I didn't really see anyone else there. Which was cool, and I got to pretend that I was out in "the wilderness". (Actually I watched that movie "Into the Wild" a few weeks ago, and I kept thinking about that...) Anyway, here's the picture tour...

I found a pretty sweet trail...

And I thought it was going to keep going...

But then it didn't. It ended in this:

Which I thought wasn't something I wanted to walk through, and so I turned back onto the main trail.

Actually, at this point, I'm going to give you another one of those neat slide-shows to look at the rest of the pictures I want to show. They're just the rest of my hike out to the lake.



So, all in all, it was a pretty good day. I enjoyed what I did in the morning, and I also enjoyed the "independent study" that I did in the afternoon. What more can you really ask for?

(BTW, the slide show is in AJAX, meaning "asynchronous JavaScript and XML", which may help to know if its not coming up. I recommend the latest release of Firefox 3.0--RC 2 or something like that--because that's what I use and everything comes up!)