Knoxville Report (Destination Imagination)

Hola!

It is a beautiful spring day: sunny, bright, with flowers everywhere. Just heavenly.

Kara and I made it back from Tennessee! A grand experience, to be sure. I was so impressed with the whole University of Tennessee--it's a beautiful campus, with wonderful facilities.

Knoxville hosted the World's Fair back in the 80's, so they have huge Expo and Conference Centers. An olympic-sized pool with the tall, tall diving platforms to have diving competitions.

The kids did such a good job--I think I told you before, that there were 6 different challenges, and each challenge was split into Elementary, Middle School, and High School/University competitions.

For Kara's challenge, at the Elementary level, there were 68 teams. So, against 68 teams, her team came in NINTH PLACE! Yippee! Pretty cool to make it to Global Finals at ALL, and then to get in the Top Ten against that many.

Besides the competition, there were activities galore, at the Expo Center, swimming & diving boards at the Aquatic Center, 3M was a sponsor so they did a Duct Tape Costume Ball, and Nasa was there with their space displays and radio-controlled moon cars.

We stayed in the dorms and ate cafeteria food. There was a lot of Pin Trading going on: each state/country came with their own sets of pins, and there were areas to spread them all out and trade with everybody else who wanted to trade.

The kids had a wonderful time, and would do it again in a heartbeat. Me, I'm not so good with huge crowds so I was "done" about halfway through! I think I heard there were 13,000 people there. They had shuttle buses which were pretty crowded and standing-room-only most of the time. Lots of walking. I told Frank I needed to go to the first half, and HE needed to go to the 2nd half! It was a great experience for the kids.

I took a bunch of pictures, of course! If you click on this Shutterfly album website, click "View Album," then "Play Slide Show," then in the upper right corner it says "options." You can make it faster, so you're not sitting there too long...a photo per second will make it 2 1/2 minutes or therabouts.

I better boogie--Have a great week! Kari