LaCrosse Trip

We had scheduled Sarah's orientation (called START, an acronym for Student Advising, Registration, and Transition) at UW-LaCrosse for Wednesday.  However, since things began at at 9:00 (registration at 8:00) and we didn't want to have to get up at 3:00 to get on the road to be there by 8:00.  So instead we drove up today to stay at a hotel and get there right away in the morning.  Then we wouldn't be so rushed and additionally we would be able to drive around LaCrosse and get to know our way around town a little bit.

I have to say, I was a little surprised at how "small" LaCrosse is.  I was under the impression that LaCrosse was a larger town, sort of like a Green Bay.  I thought that they had TV stations as well and was a media center for the area.  But the population is only slightly over 50,000, which is about the size of Wauwatosa.  The City has its own civic center/arena with a satellite UW school, so I thought it would have a little more going on.  But other than the few square blocks downtown there wasn't much else.  I will say though that it does have a nice, small town charm to it, and the surrounding area is very pretty.  But there wasn't much else besides houses, a few smaller strip malls, and nothing more, at least in LaCrosse proper.  The neighboring town of Onalaska had a mall, but other than that we didn't see much else.  Sarah has a friend who is going to Viterbo, so we drove over there to see exactly how far away it is.  At least Sarah will have a couple of friends to do things with.

We took the obligatory trip up the bluffs, and even went over to the other side of the Mississippi, just to have a look around.  But otherwise, we just hung out at the hotel.  Sarah was reading thru the materials for her registration, and went to look at some of the course descriptions.  However, after a few attempts to log into her UWL account on my laptop to look at things she was getting frustrated.  Apparently, she was having problems with her password.  I knew that she was having problems a couple of weeks ago when she had to upload her picture to go on her UWL ID.  At that time I was trying to help Sarah we were able to reset her password and then we were able to get her picture uploaded so I figured the problem was fixed.  I was wrong.

We were able to get her password changed, but when she tried logging in, she got an error message.  After about a half an hour I decided to just give up and told Sarah that she would need to see about talking to the IT help desk as soon as she could.  There was an 800 number as well as an email address to contact the department for help, but since it was 8:45 at night, I thought it was best to just to wait until morning.  More to come tomorrow when she has her orientation.