History Colorado Center (Week 2)- Ashley Duarte-Bernal

 Week two!!

Who attended the tour 

CSU Trial Gardens

Day one:  My week started with a fun floral tour in a city called Fort Collins that is about an hour away from me. Last week Ani (My super cool awesome supervisor), invited me to go on this tour with a program that she is apart of called Tours & Treks. Tours & Treks is a program through my museum that offers a wide variety of tours to enrich our understanding of our state's history. 

Butterfly landing on someone!

The tour that I was going to attend was called "Fun with Flowers in Fort Collins". My day started bright and early, I had to be at the museum at 7:30 AM. After being greeted by Kevin Snow who was our tour guide for this tour, off we went. Kevin Snow has been apart of this program for many years and he was very knowledgeable and I enjoyed his jokes along the way. I also enjoyed his talks about his passions of composting and being environmentally friendly. If the whole world would care about the environment like Kevin does, the world would be a better place.

Anyways, our first stop was the Colorado State University Flower Trial Gardens. This Garden was beyond beautiful and so well maintained. Our tour guide had been apart of the Trial Gardens for many many years he even has retired but still goes out and helps. The flowers that are planted by volunteers, workers, and what I thought most interesting, students from CSU! He gave us a brief history of the garden and how there are "competitions" almost. Which I thought was sooo cool. There are annual "Top performer Perennial" where these flowers are judged based on numerous factors. There is a section of the garden where the winners of the previous year are presented. Each row of flowers is 2x8. The students and volunteers also help maintain the flowers. The workers and students also have to do weekly reports on the flowers and how they are doing. 

One of my fav

After our tour at the Trial gardens we went to The gardens on Spring Creek. This garden has been around since 2004 and it was soooooo big. There were so many different types of flowers but what I loved the most was the kids sections. There was a kid garden planted by kids with playing areas, there were a lot of learning centers because they do a lot of kid summer camps. These camps help engage students and help them learn about helping the environment at the same time. We had an awesome tour guide here too, and everyone on the tour seemed to love it! 

Butterfly!!

There was also a small butterfly pavilion at this garden which I loved. There is one in Westminster but this one has way more butterflies.

After our tours we got a very long lunch where we got left in downtown Fort Collins. I did not know what to do for so long so I just got Starbucks and went to a book store and started reading "They Can't Take Your Name" By Robert Justice that is actually based in Colorado! I LOVED ITTT. I caved and bought it.

I was on this tour all day, so afterwards I went home. I learned so many gardening skills and about so many different job opportunities that I never knew existed as well as the floral competitions. Imagine being a flower judger lol. I also learned about how important the environment is and why we should try to shop locally or grow our own vegetables as well as compost and recycle. 

(I wanted to include this picture of a couple that attended the tour and how fascinated they were by the flowers and how cute they were :'))

 

Day two!: Last week as I mentioned, I am going to help develop a program for next years Blaxplanation Program with my supervisor Ani. So, I started brainstorming what events I could do. The possibilities were endless. I have so many ideas to possibly branch both the Latinx community as well as the black community. I came up with different ideas that would include poetry, art, music, and writing workshops. I am going to be working on developing this event throughout my entire internship and I think the hardest part is going to be narrowing down what I want to do lol. 

I arrived to the museum after a very very very stressful drive (I hate driving in downtown Denver!!!) and I went inside and talked to Ani about all my different ideas and she loved them all! There was going to be a blaxplanation "retreat" which was basically an all day meeting with all the different people in Blaxplanation. Ani was kind enough to feed us all and then the brainstorming started. 

We talked about what we wanted to do with the program, possible partnerships and sponsors that we could work with for these events. Then we came up with themes and events and it was a really insightful discussion. Everyone that was at this meeting were very very smart and educated and I was really interested in all their ideas and goals. After they heard my ideas they also all seemed to enjoy my ideas. I felt heard. After we took a break and then continued to brainstorm. We then starting to close in on what ideas we liked most and even picked possible months for when these events could take place.  

Me

    Meeting room

Day three: I was very excited for my last day this week because I had a lot of fun activities and meetings planned including visiting the Center for Colorado's Women's History which is a house museum but unfortunately when I got home the day before I started to feel very sick and only woke up worse the next day so I decided to not go in.  

I only work three days at the museum since I still wanted to try to work part-time on the side for school, so this was the end of my week!

I learned so much this week about the behind the scenes for so many different programs which has helped me appreciate the time and thought that goes into planning fun events for the public and I cannot wait to help develop my own and be apart of a program that is really truly meaningful. And I cannot wait to develop my leadership, research, and collaborative skills along the way with my internship work.

Thanks, see you next week!! ;))))