Narnia in the Caribbean.

My first Saturday as a 1st semester vet student. What to do? Celebrate completing my first week without jumping on a plane to go home? Hit the beach? Drink lots of beer and go cow tipping? Or maybe wander around at the port until I found myself in the duty free shop where I can pick myself up a nice bottle of Lime Rum…
Sadly, I did none of these things. I spent my day in a cramp study room on the third floor of Tegreman Hall looking at slides of cells and writing more notes about the digestive system of monogastric animals and ruminants. After about 6 hours, I received a text from one of the Cristin’s, who had the fabulous idea of taking a study break walkabout with the other Kristin and me.
Since we only see a portion of the campus during classes, we decided to check out the other side where the 6th & 7th semester students spend a lot of their time. Along the way we saw a very intriguing sign:

It reads: Stairway to the Sea

Of course, this was way more exciting than looking at a bunch of closed up buildings, so away we went. We stepped through the narrow break in the vegetation below the sign, and found a crude stairway winding down the side of the cliff.

Mystery stairs...

Along the path we saw two swings, set amongst the trees. Not sure if they were mere decoration or if at some time the bushes and trees were cut back more, but now it would be rather difficult to get a good arc going…you would end up in the trees.

Kind of a cool idea, but a little too dicey for me.

As we reached the bottom of the path, the ocean became louder and louder. There was just as narrow an opening at the bottom as at the top, creating this sort of mysterious feeling over moving through to another world. The bottom opened up onto a wooden gazebo built right on the rocks at the oceanfront. It was indeed another world. You can stand on that gazebo and not see a single sight all around you that portends of any human inhabitants. Oh, but we did see some goats. They popped out of the trees, walked down the rocks a bit, and then went back into the trees.

The doorway to heaven!

Wouldn't even think that just up that cliff is a vet school.

Nicely designed, wouldn't last two seconds in a hurricane.

The sign they're looking at said the stairway and gazebo were sponsored by Hill's pet food co.

We stayed down there for quite some time, watching the sun change the sky to fabulous shades of pink and orange. The tide crept in slowly, occasionally spraying us with mist when it hit the rocks just so. We’ve decided that this will be our happy place. Our non-study, private getaway from campus (especially since we have no cars to actually get away from campus). We may even hold fermented beverage nights there, complete with pizza from Dominos (they deliver) or some cooked buffet we make on our 2 burner stove-tops.

The students leaving an offering for what can only be the Study God.

Gorgeous sunset.

Everyone needs a happy place, and now we found ours.