Last week we made the road trip down to Las Cruces to visit NMSU for freshman orientation. The drive wasn't too horrible, we took our time and it was about 8 hours. We stopped a lot because we had the baby with us. She did really really well.
I tried to take some pictures of the scenery as we went down but a lot of them didn't turn out. I did manage to catch this sunset south of Albuquerque,
and this rainbow near Socorro.
Yes, we hit some rain. Rain out across the desert is weird though. It would be dry, then it would POUR and then instantly stop, then the sun would come out, then it would rain so hard we'd think about pulling over, but then it would stop again.
Other than the weather, the drive was pretty uneventful. Oh, I did get stung on the knee by some weird bug. From where it stung me it turned the blood vessels in my leg red all up and down my leg. It didn't hurt or anything, but it was weird!
So, anyway, we crashed for the night about two minutes from the university, but managed to oversleep. Miss C was supposed to report at 8 am, we woke up at 7:45!! So after a mad dash to the university, getting lost, then stopping for directions, we finally got where she was supposed to be - about a half hour late. But all was well, the first part was basically a lecture reciting all the stuff that was going on that day; the same information that was on the schedules they gave us.
The morning session for each of us was basically "this is this, that is that, etc. etc. etc." Kinda boring actually, but informative.
We had lunch in the cafeteria where Miss C will be having all her meals. It's basically set up like a food court where one station give out burgers, another pizza, another sandwiches and so on. There's a salad bar and a soup station and all that stuff. She won't go hungry, that's for sure. The food was really good! She's all worried about the "Freshman 15", and she should be! It will be so easy to pig out.
In the afternoon she went and met with her adviser and got set up on her classes and all that. We visited her dorm and took a tour of the campus. Here's the pictures of where she'll be living. I didn't get pictures of the room itself, but this is what the building looks like.
The place is HUGE! It takes up like 4 football fields. There's 4 sections, each with a big court in the middle for hanging out or whatever. It's three stories high! But her room in on the ground floor, thank goodness. Her dorm will hold more students than the population of the town I grew up in.
The campus is pretty compact, but humongous. I hope her classes are close together. We took one of those tour shuttles and it took us 30 minutes to get from one side of the campus to the other!
As the day wound down, Miss C only had a couple things left to do before we could get out of there. Unfortunately, the 1700 other freshmen had to do the same thing: get registered for classes and talk to financial aid.
Here she is at the head of the line, officially registering for her classes:
And here she is waiting in line for the financial aid people. At this point she's already been waiting an hour.
I wish they could have found a better way to do things like this, they knew how many people they were going to have, but I guess it was better than it could have been.
So now she's an official college student. She originally registered for 17 hours, but she was set to do psychology and philosophy at the same time, so she dropped one of them. She might have to drop another as she might already have credit for English. In that case she'll have to find another class. But the best part is, everything is paid for! If you've been reading the blog, you know she got a scholarship and it covers EVERYTHING! There's even enough left for her books. She will probably still get a work study job to cover her fun, but the best part of that is as a scholarship student she get's the highest priority when applying, plus it pays fantastically well!
Well, that was our NMSU adventure. We'll have more to share in about 32 days when we move her in.
