 This is Josh and we're back again with another video. Things look a little different. It's because I am not in my basement anymore. This is actually my dorm room. I plan on doing some dorm tour videos later and giving you guys a tour of my residential college and all the stuff that I have here. But today's video is going to be the story of my pre-orientation trip that I took last week. All right, so I am planning on doing Air Force ROTC at Yale. So part of the Air Force ROTC program was all of the Air Force ROTC cadets actually went on a pre-orientation hiking trip together. Okay, so what this trip was called was foot. Foot stands for first year outdoor orientation training. Basically, we spent a week outside hiking, backpacking, cooking our own food. It was a really amazing experience. Last time I got to talk to you guys it was in my leaving for Yale video and now it's about eight or nine days later. I had pre-filmed all the videos you've been seeing for the last week. So I'm gonna tell you guys the story of how it went. I got up here and maybe lead into a little bit of move-in day. Okay, on Saturday, August 19th, I went to Union Station in Washington, D.C. and jumped on a five hour train ride all the way up to New Haven, Connecticut, which is where Yale is located. Got off the train, met up with a couple other Yale students that were also on the train with me and we took a shuttle all the way to Old Campus on Yale, which is where I met my foot group. So Old Campus was super busy with all the pre-orientations going on. Everyone was super excited, loud, energetic and it was a really great time meeting all these people for the first time. Once we got to campus, I was immediately handed a sweat band and wrist bands and we were told to choreograph an 80s dance routine. Yeah! Why you may ask, I had absolutely no idea but our leaders wanted us to and it was pretty fun meeting all the other people and immediately being thrown into kind of an awkward situation with them. Got to know them pretty well really quick. So that night we actually went on to the New Haven Greens and played a bunch of group games. All the ROTC people, including my group completely dominated, it was really fun and then we gathered in front of one of the halls on Old Campus and a bunch of the foot leaders did like little skits and stuff to teach us about not destroying the environment when we're out on the trail. That next morning we woke up super early, packed up all our hiking gear and made sure we had everything we needed and we got on a bus that was about a two hour bus right up to Massachusetts at the base of the Berkshares which are part of the Appalachian Trail. So I actually hiked, I believe it was around 45 miles along the Appalachian Trail in Massachusetts over that weekend. So this afternoon we finally get to our drop off location, tie up our hiking boots, put our packs on and began to hit the trail. It was really fun getting to know everyone. There were actually 10 of us, total 10 first years and then a junior and a senior at Yale that were leading the trail. We played a lot of games on the trail, a lot of word games, memory games to keep us occupied while we were hiking. The first day was pretty short, I think it was only around seven miles. We pulled into camp at a decent hour and we actually were able to sleep in one of the shelters that was there on the Appalachian Trail. It's like a wooden platform with a roof and didn't have to pitch a giant tarp to sleep on. So that was good, slept pretty good that night even though you're on a pad in a sleeping bag, it was all right. One of the special things about foot is that each night a couple of people do what is called a hometown, which is where basically they sit down in front of everyone and they tell their life story, everything about them, everything they've done, anything they want to share, anything they want to get off their chest. Normally these end up lasting about an hour and a half or two hours and you learn so much about a person. Like honestly, I feel like I know some of the people that were on my foot trip better than I know some of my closest friends because they opened up to me and told me about everything that went on in their life. A lot of times they got really emotional. It really teaches you not to judge a person when you first meet them because there's always something else that's going on in their life. So each day, we normally would do a hometown at lunch and then we'd do two that night. I did mine like the third night, I think. Mine went really well. Got to tell my story of all the different places I'd live. Got to talk about my siblings, my family, my friends. It was really awesome to share and get that off my chest. Now I'm gonna talk about the food on the trip. Food was interesting. Breakfast was pretty much oats and then we had a small bag of chocolate chips and a small bag of brown sugar that we could put in it that eventually ran out really quickly. Lunch and dinner. Lunch was always tortillas. We had like 14 packs of tortillas with a couple jars of peanut butter, jelly, Nutella. So lunch was just tortillas and whatever you wanted to put on it. Dinner, we normally had to boil water and cook something. A couple nights it was pasta. We had couscous, lentils, a lot of really plain food and so you had to spice it up with like taco seasoning or hot sauce to make it taste better. So the first couple days were good and then eventually I think it was the third night we pulled into camp and there was a giant rainstorm on the forecast. So we set up camp, we put up our tarp and I'm in the middle of my hometown. I'm about an hour in and it just starts absolutely pouring. I mean like so loud, I can barely even talk. Yeah, it got to the point where I had actually stopped my hometown and I had to continue the next day because no one could hear me and I couldn't even hear my own voice over the pouring rain on the tarp that we had set up. We set up like an A-frame tarp with one on the bottom where we slept 12 people all in a row. I mean, we were just like tight right next to each other like on top of each other. Yeah, it was interesting to say the least. And that whole night it rained. Like I probably only got two or three hours of sleep that night because it just kept keeping me up and then eventually the rain got into the tarp. I was right in the middle. So all the rain pooled right under my sleeping mat and made it super soggy. My sleeping bag got wet. I woke up in my shower. So of course you wake up and it's like 45 degrees outside and I'm like getting the hypothermia. It was all right though. Woke up, dried everything out that night, put on some dry clothes and I kept hiking. So 45 miles later, our last campsite which was more recreational. There were bigger campsites. They had more stuff going on there. We slept there that night. Woke up like 4 a.m. Like only got like four hours of sleep. We got shuttled to the visitor center and there we hopped on a bus and got back to Yale just in time for move-in day. Like move-in started at nine and we got there at about 11. I'm gonna go into my whole move-in day story later but I just wanted to give you guys a little information on what I was doing in the week leading up to it and why I wasn't able to answer any of your comments or like anything. I do plan on making a bunch of new videos in the future so that you guys know how my life at Yale is now. Definitely a dorm tour. I might interview my roommate. I might show you guys my other sweet mates. The common room next door. Give you guys a tour of my college. Talk about what residential college I'm in. Give you guys a tour of all the stuff that goes on in the basement. Maybe even do a day in the life. Comment down below if any of that sounds awesome to you. Hope you guys enjoyed my Yale pre-orientation story. I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed making this video for you guys. If you enjoyed it, if you learned something, if you want more, drop a like and hit that big red subscribe button to support more content for me in the future. Comment down below any questions or concerns or what you thought. I'll try to respond to everyone. As always, I'll be back again tomorrow. Actually, I'll be back again as soon as I have time to film another video, so be great. And see you soon.