Here she is, posing as she comes out of the door for the last time before heading off into her great college adventure. It's like 5am, a little past. We thought about not sleeping and just heading out the evening before, but then we thought better of it. It is a very long drive, and you don't want to attempt it without sleep.
Being the geeky dad with a camera that I am, I had to snap one of her getting into the car. She is a little irritated with me at this point because I've been chanting "let's go let's go let's go" for about 5 minutes.
Finally we were on the road. It was a great, scenic drive, once the sun came up. But for the first couple of hours we drove along in the dark. I caught her trying to read in the pale pre-dawn twilight. She made a face at me.
I didn't take any pictures of the drive. I was just too sleepy. Plus I didn't know how much life my batteries had in them and I really wanted to get some shots when we got there.
We made a couple of regular stops for gas and bathroom, hit a drive-thru for lunch, but we pretty much drove straight through. We made the whole drive in about 7 hours (it took us 10 when we went for orientation!)
Finally we made it into Las Cruces, made the exit to the University, and followed the signs directing us where to go to unload. It was about 1 in the afternoon when we saw her dorm. This is the street-side view of Garcia hall. It's very pretty.
Her room is in the D section. They had signs posted on every section. Each section is about the size of a football field and three stories high. There's a lovely little garden in the middle of each. I don't know how many rooms are on each floor in each section, but with two people per room, I'm thinking there are easily close to a thousand kids in this massive building.
We pulled in to park right across from where her room was. Fortunately her room was on the first floor so we didn't have far to go. There was this large bush next to the car with all these little white flowers on it. I don't know what they are, but they were nice.
As you can see, the back of our little Subaru was stuffed, really stuffed. They had shopping carts available to help us move the stuff from the car to the room.
Geeky dad with the camera irritating his college co-ed daughter. She was so anxious to get everything moved in that she just wanted me out of the way.
Shortly after we started unloading, a guy asked us if we wanted help. They told us at orientation that the Greek society volunteers to help people move in, so this wasn't unexpected. However, what we didn't expect was that he would grab 7 or 8 other guys and they would unload the car all in one shot!
Here she is trying to deal with the chaos of everything coming in at once. Her roommate wouldn't arrive until the next day, but we didn't know that, we were trying to keep the mess just to her side.
Her room is pretty nice as far as dorm rooms go. It's a well used building, so there were scuff marks on the walls and such, but it was relatively clean and the air conditioning works great. She has a ton of storage space and a pretty nice walk in closet.
Her bed was unusually long. A lot of colleges do that now. We had to buy special sheet to fit. Of course everything has to be green with her. I don't know why.
Here you can see a good shot of the desk area which is the main living space of the room besides the bed. You can see that she set herself up quite nicely with a fridge, a microwave, a coffee maker, and her TV. The dorms have free cable, she get's like 70 channels! I told her I was going to stay so I could watch her TV. She didn't think I was funny.
It took us a couple hours or so to get everything set up and put away. But when it was done it was really cozy.
Finally, she was all set. Here she is getting comfortable on her bed with her favorite thing in the whole world, her sketchbook.
Finally, it was time to go. We were all exhausted from the drive, the excitement, and finally the relief of having her all set and settled. She laid down for a nap and we left to find a comfortable hotel.
There is a PS to the story. She called a little while later to ask what we were doing for dinner. While she could have gone to the cafeteria, she wanted to spend one more meal with us. We grabbed some KFC and ate at the hotel.
Then the next day, as we were ready for the drive home, she called again. She needed help getting her computer set up on the network. So back to her dorm to fiddle with the cord and network settings.
A final good-bye and we were off to home. I had the video camera with me but never found anything worth recording, so I played with it on the way home. I set it to record in fast forward and captured about 300 miles of our ride home.
