Hiking just outside Reno, NV

Spring Break is always a great excuse to go on an adventure no matter what school you go to. Evergreen’s spring break is really nice for the added bonus of having evaluation week the week before the official week off. The equivalent to a finals week at a normal college, evaluation (eval) week is extremely anticlimactic in comparison. While finals weeks at other schools are notoriously stressful and tense, eval week is really just a final checkin with your professors to go over their evaluation of your performance in and out of class over the ten weeks of class as well as award credits based on that evaluation. As long as you put in the work over the quarter, eval week is very low pressure. All of the final projects and hard work have already been completed and turned in and you just have the one meeting (normally 30 minutes) with your professor. Other than that, nothing. That being the case and especially if you set your meeting early in the week, this basically means a two week long spring break.

My friend and I took advantage of this and drove down to Reno, NV to visit another friend who we met at Evergreen and has since graduated. Only 11 hours away, it is a doable trip in one day but could easily turn it into a multiple day trip, stopping at Crater Lake National Park, Redwood National Park, and/or Lassen Volcanic National Park. Other  road trip destinations from Olympia include San Francisco, CA (12.5 hours), Vancouver BC (3.5 hours), and Bend, OR (5 hours) in addition to the obvious Seattle and Portland.

Downtown Reno was cool with a lot of thrift stores, good restaurants, and casinos (if you’re into that). The co-op there was amazing too. We were also able to go on a lot of hikes and drive up to Lake Tahoe to go snowshoeing. It was a fun trip and nice to get out of the rainy PNW during the last dredges of winter (although to be fair it did rain or snow in Reno pretty much every day we were there). It was also really nice to see our friend and all of the cool things she’s been up to since graduating.

Snowshoeing near Lake Tahoe