Brevard College's GEOL 270/271 Field Trip to Southern Italy and Sicily--May 11-24, 2003

JR's Journal

Anne Chapin, Bob Bauslaugh, and I had been talking about this trip for a couple of years so we decided to finally do it this year. We met for lunch early in the Fall 2002 semester and blocked out what each of us wanted to show to the students. GEOL 270 is a 4-credit lab course but we received inquires from students who just wanted to do the field trip without the seminar aspect of GEOL 270. I responded to this by creating GEOL 271, a 2-credit Pass-Fail course that is open to anyone who wants to participate and is willing to pay the trip fees and Brevard College tuition. We had set a minimum of 20 students to make the trip go. The combination of GEOL 270 and GEOL 271 made it happen.

Anne Chapin is an art historian who specializes in the art excavated from classical sites around the Mediterranean. Her husband, Bob Bauslaugh, is a classical archaeologist and ancient historian. I am a geologist with passions for volcanology and sedimentation. Italy proved to be a wonderful place to study all of these topics. As is usually the case, the students learned a lot about these subjects by participating in the field course. This course had the added educational benefit of introducing them to a new culture and language. Most of us tried to communicate in basic, pidgin-Italian. It was fun. I think most who tried realized that, with some practice, they could communicate in another language, something most Europeans do as a part of everyday living.

I'd like to thank Heidi Galloway who managed to read and enter my handwritten journal into MS Word format so that it could be presented here.

Here is a list of the participants. Most have home pages and email addresses that can be reached by clicking the name. I will try to keep this list current as people move around.
 

Participants: 

Jim Reynolds    Anne Chapin    Bob Bauslaugh       (leaders)

Drew Chapin (kid)

Here is the list of this year's participants in GEOL 270.

Four GEOL 271 students also participated:

Erin Bauslaugh (Georgia Perimeter College) Sarah Keyes (Georgia State University)
Mario Filotei (Brevard College) Richard Lovett (Brevard College)

May 2003

Clicking in any of the boxes of the calendar below will take to the journal entry. Most days will eventually  include some photos.

Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
May 11

Greer to somewhere over the Atlantic

 May 12

Rome

 May 13

Rome--the Forum

 May 14

Rome--the Vatican

 May 15

Rome to Naples (Vesuvius and Pompeii)

 May 16

Naples--Campi Flegrei

 May 17

Naples--Herculaneum and the Archeological Museum
May 18

Naples to Stromboli

 May 19

Stromboli to Lipari

 May 20

Lipari to Taormina

 May 21

Taormina to Siracusa

 May 22

Siracusa to Agrigento

 May 23

Agrigento to Palermo

 May 24

Palermo to Greer