Work Hard, Play Hard

Wow, what an exciting first day! The beautiful morning started out with a few of our NLC runners taking a 3-mile jog throughout the city of Portland, Oregon. Breakfast was at 8:30. By 9:30 we were lovingly driven to the Tenth Church of Christ Scientist of Portland for an amazing sunday school service. The church was well prepared for our large group of 19 kids, and we were split into 4 different sunday school classes. After some great discussions during sunday school, we headed over to the main church for our NLC overview presentation. The presentation started with the lively rap we wrote about CS at Adventure Unlimited last summer, and also consisted of 30 second highlights of our program. After taking questions from the audience, we enjoyed a hearty picnic of delicious sandwhiches and fresh fruit on the front lawn. The weather was absolutely perfect!! It was around 80 degrees and not a cloud in the sky.

When our bellies were full, we decided it was time for a dessert of inspiration. The church was holding a lecture given by Marecil DeLacey about the basic concepts of Christian Science. Then we had a question and answer session with our genius practitioner Tom, who is more awesome than words can describe. After this, we evaluated ourselves as leaders, and chose a few main leadership qualities we would like to work on the following year. Then, we got to find out more about our trip!!! What we've been waiting for!!

We discovered our groups we would be with for the next two weeks; coincedentally, they were the same people as our sunday school classes! We then picked out team names; The Toy Box, The Apocolipse, The Emoticons, and The Fresh FruitAge. We are SO excited to finally know who we will be traveling with! Finally, we got some playing time at the end of the day. We drove down to the river and had dinner as the sun was setting. What a gorgeous view we had as we played frisbee in the park and pet numerous dogs.

Then we were off for another adventure to the skate rink! No, not skateboarding, and not ice skating either; it was the old school lace up roller blading time. This was a blast as well as a challenge, as many of us had never skated before. We worked hard all day and got our reward. Work hard, play hard. That's how we roll.

NLC 2013. nightynight.

-Gwen Umbach, Denali Marsh, and Robin Marquand