CTLT Orientation/SA Joint Meeting Event: South Lake Tahoe

    This past weekend, I traveled to the Nevada State 4-H Camp, in South Lake Tahoe, for this year's California 4-H Technology Leadership (CTLT) Team Orientation/ CA 4-H State Ambassador (SAs) Joint Meeting Event.  This would be the first time that I have been to the Lake Tahoe area, and this is a trip that I shall never forget.  Traveling to a CTLT event starts as any other event.  I flew up to Sacramento from Ontario, and someone would pick me up.  The original plan was for me to be picked up, taken to the State 4-H Office in UC Davis, and I would get a University Sedan, in which I would drive Rowan and Neal up to Lake Tahoe.  In the time I was flying up to Sacramento, things changed to where I ended up being picked up by one of the vans, and headed right up to Lake Tahoe.  I was upset to begin with, because I was looking excited to drive the mountain roads, listening to my music, and having one of my good friends in the car, and learn about our new team member on the drive up.  We also had a plan to stay behind when people left to do a prank to our advisor's car. Because of the change, I ended up not being apart of the prank.  The good thing about not driving, is I didn't have to worry about getting enough sleep, so I will be able to drive back on Sunday.
     

The drive up was a nice drive.  It was fun being able to interact with some of the SAs along with one of our new team members for the CTLT.  It helped that I know one of the SAs in the van, Kyile.  The weather wasn't the best that day, for it was raining in the valley, and it was sprinkling near Lake Tahoe.  I was dissapointed that we arrived in South Lake Tahoe at night, so I was unable to see the view driving down into the Lake Tahoe area.  We were the last group, that came from UC Davis, to make it to the camp.  We where so excited from being in Tahoe, we stopped to take a group photo of the camp sign.  We parked, and everyone came out to help us move our lugage to the dinning hall, since it is kinda hard with the snow.  It was 36 degrees as we arrived in Tahoe, which we arrived around 6:50 PM.  Though I couldn't see much because it was dark, you could tell the entire area was covered with snow, about 2-2 1/2 feet of snow on the ground.  It was great!  The rest of the night was filled with Ice Breaker games (Get to know you games) and a general meeting about what will be going on during this event.  We all went to our cabins to set up and go to Sleep.  I slept in the Director's cabin in the camp, which is where all us adult advisors slept.  The cabin was great, because we had a bathroom and a shower inside the cabin.  The girls would have to walk outside though the snow to get to their bathroom and showers, and im not sure if it was the same for the guys cabins or not.  I picked to sleep at the bed next to the window, so the first thing I see when I wake up with be the beautiful landscape covered in snow.  Before we went to bed, a few of us advisors when to check to make sure everyone was ok in their cabins.  The main reason why I went was more to be in the snow then anything else. On the way back to our cabin, I stepped on a cement ramp to a cabin, and sliped for it was ice, and i crashed my knee hard on the cement.  I knew I was going to fall at some point, because I always do with snow around, but this hurt like hell.  It hurt to walk for alittle bit, but then the pain went away, and I was fine.
     

In the morning, i forgot to turn off my phone alarm from the other day, so at 6:00 AM, you just heard a loud IM ON A BOAT! and that woke everyone up on my side of the cabin, kinda scared them, so I had to rush out of bed to turn it off, since we still had an hour before we needed to wake up.  I went back to bed, and couldn't sleep.  It took about 20 mins before I was able to see sun light, and i slowly saw the camp light up.  It was the best thing in the world to wake up to everything covered in snow.  The first part of the day went really well, we mostly had the teams off in separate meetings in the morning, working on their own projects.  For the CTLT, it was our orientation that happens every Jan.   Our year has always been from Jan. to Dec. so we would have our orientation in Jan with the new members.  This will be the last time we have an orientation in Jan., for we have changed our team year to July to August, a 14 month term, which follows the same year format as the SAs team.  After the morning we had lunch, then we set off to have both groups take an adventure to the camp private beach.  I do have to say, the food was great at the camp!  I have never had camp food that didn't seem like camp food.  I wish all camps had good this great!  We got to the lake, and I was a little disappointed at first, for all day we have been covered with fog, and when we got to the lake, all you could see is just the water to about a few yards away, then it disappears into the fog.  I really wanted to go out there, and just see all the mountains on the other side, just covered in snow, but that didn't happen.  We spend an hour out on the beach, chillin, having fun, and taking photos.  Some people were crazy enough to roll up their jeans or pants and go into the water.  We were in the 30's that day, and I don't want to even know how cold the water was, but people did it.  

 

After the lake, we split our own ways again, until dinner.  The CTLT accomplished a lot in that time, planning out our projects we will be working on the following year.  Afterwards, both teams came together to have a workshop on professionalism, which we would need for the State Leadership Conference, where both teams are together doing different things, and need to be professional.  After the professionalism training, we had to all get into formal wear, and get back to have a training on Formal Dinners, which we did while we ate.  Lots of people didn't like the idea, but  I was excited, because I have been to a handful of official formal dinners, and they are very fun to be at.  I wore a long sleeve blue dress shirt, and a dark navy blue dress pants.  For my tie, I wore my Jelly Fish Tie, which is blue with Orange Jelly Fish.  I kinda had a competition with another advisor, Steven, on who had the better tie.  Which his was dark red with tons of little pandas.   In the end, people loved my tie, and got lots of comments.  Steven didn't get anything.  I WIN!  For the dinner, we were spit into four different tables, and we had to do different tasks.  We had to set our own settings, and get them right.  One of the tasks I had to do is serve the "wine" which was really pepsi.  In the end, our table didn't have the most points, but to me it didn't matter, because it was very enjoyable to be dressed up, and act all formal and sophisticated.  Its not too often I get to do that.  Afterwards, everyone went to change back into their normal clothes.  I really wanted to stay dressed in the formals, but I decided to change, because it would be strange to be the only one dressed up.   Both teams came together to have some serious discussions on the state program, and all of it's events/opportunities.  The main point about the discussion was to see how we could change events in order to get more participation throughout the state.  We also discussed each opportunity as if it was worth it for the state to still offer.  The good news is that none of us felt anything should be cut, but we did feel some programs needed to be changed.  After the meeting, we all just hung out, playing games, having a blast setting up facebook pages for SLC and the SAs, and enjoying each other's company.

The next morning started just like the last, except we didn't wake up to my phone alarm since I turned that off.  Both teams had their separate meetings.  The CTLT finished up our project planning, and then worked on filming introduction videos/fun videos to give our team more viability.  It was a lot of fun to work with the team to plan and film videos together.  It was a great team bonding project, and we hope to have more like that in the future.  After our filming, it was lunch.  Daniel and I was supposed to be KP, and we didn't show up because we were behind in filming, and totally forgot about KP.  We volunteered to do KP after lunch, and let the people who signed up go do other things.  We cleaned up the camp afterwards, and packed up the cars and vans.  Then we said our goodbyes and went our own ways.  This time, i was in a van with everyone who was going to the airport except the driver.  We left around 2:30 and got to the airport around 5:00.  I took off at 8 and landed around 9:15.  I finally got home near 10:00 that night.  The camp facilities were great, and I had a blast bonding with both old friends and becoming friends with new people.  I really hope that we get to do this again, and in the same location during the winter.