Road Trip!

Bright and early Monday morning, the Savanna Travelling Studio is heading out on the North Country trip with stops in Mason City, Minneapolis, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, Duluth, Devil's Lake in Wisconsin, Chicago, Galena, and finally, Dubuque.  After three intense weeks on the road, we are back in Ames and the College of Design for a short stint before we head out again on our South Country trip.

So far, it has been a whirlwind start to the Fall 2012 semester. I have been solo teaching an introductory course - Investigating Landscape Form, Process, and Detail - to 34 new landscape architecture students. It has been fun. In fact, it is more fun than I ever imagined, but it has been lots of work figuring out the intricacies of this new career.  Going back to school five years ago was scary; writing a thesis was exhaustive; this teaching thing is a whole other level of work with hours of preparation, lecture, and then grading of assignments.  Now that we are taking the studio "on the road," I have to figure out how to do it all from the back of a van!

However this new assignment turns out for me-and the rest of our studio-it will be an adventure I never could have dreamed up.  I am so grateful to all those in my department who made this happen. I am one lucky duck.