Hello friends and family! Welcome to our featured trip blog! As you all know, our groups work hard on their blogs to share their fun experiences with us and let us in on a bit of the action! We thought what better way to do this than share featured blogs on our website every few days? You can expect one new featured blog from all different trips every few days depending on what groups have service at the time! This summer is truly amazing, and we hope you will enjoy these sneak peeks as much as we have been enjoying them behind the scenes! 

Hi everyone! Today’s blog will be written by me, Atlas. Yesterday we all said goodbye to our host families as we got on the bus to head to the beach. This was quite hard for us, because we had made really nice connections with our families. Moments after the 7 hour bus ride began, most of us fell asleep. At our first pit stop, Roo, Jonny, Cami, Mauricio (our amazing driver,) and I (Atlas) enjoyed a smoothie from a fresh smoothie bar. Then we headed back to the bus and finished the ride. We got to our hotel and put our stuff down in our rooms. We had a little pool time before our leader’s had a surprise for us! We had a paint war! Quentin and Maya M tried to escape while everyone covered each other in paint! In the end, I (Atlas) got both of them! Then we headed to the beach! Amelia’s jaw dropped when she saw the beach for the first time. As soon as we put our bags down on the beach, Maya M, Maya L, Natalie, Viv, Mollie and Quentin ran straight into the waves. Amelia spent some time shaping up Brody’s eyebrows. Natalie, Maya K, Mollie and Ali spent some time reading on the beach to take a break from the HUGE waves! Those of us in the water formed a buddy system game for checking on each other as we all swam under a big wave as a back up to Roo and Ali’s lifeguarding!! We had a really good time in the ocean and playing in the waves. We got back to the hotel and had a night swim session, poolside dance party, and evening meeting. Brody and Quentin were the first students to receive their Bold Earth Hats in a Bold Earth Hat Ceremony at evening meeting!

Today was our first day on our community service project: saving the tortugas! Today we did a beach clean up where we moved a bunch of sticks so the mama turtles could make their crawls up the beach to lay their eggs. We all got a surprise at the end of our clean up session- we got to hold freshly hatched baby turtles in the hatchery! We got back, had lunch, and spent a bunch of time in the pool. We played pool Olympics featuring our two teams: the Bold Buckeroos and the Uplifted Double Dragons. Then we went back after dinner for a night walk as part of our sea turtle conservation project. We had our evening meeting where Vivian earned her Bold Earth hat from Roo before walking down to the beach. When we first got there, Vivian and Natalie helped our guide Danny bring out the 79 baby turtles that were born earlier today. As a group, we all got to help release them into the sand so they could make their crawl into the ocean! We had to be careful not to move when the waves came up to us, as sometimes the turtles would move around in the water and end up behind us. After all babies were released and made it to the ocean, we took a stroll along the beach! We came home and per usual, the whole group hung out and talked. Tonight Maya M and Maya K prioritized their sleep and slept soundly well before group wide bed time!

Save the Turtles!

Atlas