After breakfast this morning and talking to mom on skype, Natasha ran along to one of the many organized orientations scheduled around campus.  I made cookies.  Spice cookies without cinnamon or ginger.  Or molasses.  Right. So nutmeg cookies with cloves.  They weren't great, but not awful either.  They baked up nice but the flavour was a little off.  

 We ate lunch, leftovers from the night before and Natasha left for another program.  I went for a walk.  There are a lot of walking trails close to campus so I walked up to Shane Lake, about 30 minuntes away.

 The walk wasn't difficult and the lake was quite small.  There were kids fishing for trout and dogs chasing sticks.  The forest here is obviously much different than the forests at home, which I always love to see.  There are much less ferns, many more birch trees.

 I saw frogs and butterflies and an abundance of flowers.  Which I picked for Natasha.

When I got back Natasha and I decided to walk down the long hill to dinner.  Because it was a holiday Monday the buses stopped running at 5:30.  The walk down was 5 kilometres and took 55 minutes.  Dinner we ate at Earls, each with a delicious margarita!

 The walk back up took 50 minutes for some reason and was not as bad as we thought it would be.  We hardly felt the two kilometres uphill!

 We were invited to a campfire up at Shane Lake with the students here.  We met at 9:00 and started walking.  Someone knew how to get up there easily enough, but it was not the way I had walked earlier in the day.  We stood around the campfire chatting and eating smores with some sweet students.  One from the US, one from France and one from Germany.  When we decided to leave 40 minutes later Andrea, Natasha's roommate and her head lamp came with us.  Unfortunetly we got very very lost.  Well...we knew how to get back to the fire, but not down to the school.  We walked for an hour down long dark roads before Andrea flagged the next driver down and asked for directions.  It was going to be a very long way he told us.  We would be walking for a very long time and would we like a ride?  Thankfully we accepted.  He was a UNBC grad himself and had gotten lost on those very roads when we started.  He dropped us off 10 minutes later at the dorms and we jumped out of the truck.  What an adventure.