It's official - we've finished our fieldwork for the season. Fourteen intertidal communities, 2100 km (1300 miles), four months, countless boxes of mac and cheese, and way fewer showers than I would like to think about, we are back at UC Irvine.
There's nothing quite like looking back at your fieldwork season and seeing the good parts. And there are so so many, which I'll tell you all about. But first the bad stuff - long weeks of smelly socks and really smelly everything, sleeping through alarm clocks, stomach flu, losing field assistants, losing expensive equipment, getting blown out by 15-foot waves, accidentally swimming in 40º water, and way too many jars of queso.
But without the bad stuff, we wouldn't have as many amazing stories. So here's to four months of memories, of jumping into lakes, making s'mores on a campfire, discovering Ferndale, making French toast after a 4 am tide, and traveling all the way from San Diego, CA to Forks, WA (we didn't see any vampires).
I finished sampling my last site on Monday and it's still somewhat surreal that our bio bus adventure is over (for now at least!). But there is still a lot of cool science and stories to come, so we hope you'll keep rolling with us and following our next adventures.
- Nyssa and Piper
