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I was studying in Madrid last spring, so I missed my favorite time of year: Little 500. The annual bike race and all its trappings bring out the best in college sports drama (and, in the week of the races, the best/worst of college partying). The season kicks off during Rookie Week in early March, but the real feeling starts the weekend of Quals, which happened Saturday. I was scheduled for the first session, starting at 8 a.m., so I got as many photos as I could without breaking off my fingers in the near-freezing weather.

Members and coaches for the Sigma Phi Epsilon team huddle before their 8 a.m. run in the first session of Little 500 qualifications Saturday, Mar. 27, 2011, at Indiana University's Bill Armstrong Stadium in Bloomington, Ind. The team's four-lap time of 2:36.36 qualified for the 25th of 33 spots in the men's Little 500 race on Apr. 16. (Alex Farris | Indiana Daily Student)

In the week that I haven't been spending in Japan, I've done small retweekings of the website, started compiling the data on a campus accidents project, done Internet research for a photo story, baked a pie for Pi Day and read all the strips of my girlfriend's favorite web comic, Questionable Content. (She insists there are parallels with her life and with mine. ...There are some.) None of this required much in the way of getting out of the house, so over the last six days I've seen very little of the Great Outdoors that I can't see from my window.

That changed today. Two journalist friends (Bailey Loosemore and Jake New) and I drove to a small waterfall near Harrodsburg, about 15 minutes outside of Bloomington. On the way, we skipped rocks, walked across logs, did some climbing and found an old haunted house.

Bailey has been here before, and she even talked with the owner. We're cool, especially since we aren't hunting.

For the past semester I've been more than excited to go to Japan for my International Reporting class. My classmates and I were organizing interviews in Hiroshima, in the southwest region of the largest Japanese island, Honshu, to examine the issues surrounding the atomic bombs dropped in that city and in Nagasaki. We had appointments set up with bomb survivors, chemical scientists and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, and we were set to leave for the Asian country by planes to Chicago and to Narita airport in Tokyo on Friday.

Before we could leave Friday for our trip, however, another disaster, this time natural, hit the island. As I'm sure you know about already, hundreds of people have died in an earthquake and its effects off the coast of Sendai, in the norteast region of Honshu. Tsunamis, aftershocks (really earthquakes in themselves) and nuclear emergencies have plagued the nation, and the U.S. State Department put up a travel alert effective until April 1.

So, there won't be any spring break travel experience to Japan. Had we been there already, Tokyo and Hiroshima were far enough from the worst to be relatively safe; but I don't think our parents and close friends would think the same way. And in a good case of keeping things in perspective, the IU School of Journalism said, "Any change in our Japanese program going forward pales in comparison to this tragedy, which is the largest earthquake in Japan in a century." That said, the school is working on going to Japan after graduation to maintain the travel component of the course.

Given everything that happened, I don't have any photos from Japan. I do have this one from yesterday morning, when the bus trip back to Bloomington. Later that day, the class met to decide what to do to replace the trip.

The sun rises over southern Indiana as students from Indiana University return from the Indianapolis International Airport after their class trip to Japan was postponed on Friday, March 11, 2011, on Indiana State Road 39. Earthquakes, aftershocks, tsunamis and nuclear emergencies rocked Japan early Friday morning, causing hundreds of deaths and canceled flights.