As the many college students populating this board know, Spring Break is right around the corner. Usually I'm too poor to do anything too crazy (last year I hitchhiked to NOLA), but I find myself in a lucky situation this year: a good friend has two plane tickets for anywhere in the USA that must be used before April. The question, then, is where? A nice place to have a relaxing time and see/do some cool shit? Or perhaps a trashy cesspool to go hog wild and sling dick like there's no tomorrow. So, Idiot Board, FOCUS: You have a free round-trip ticket anywhere in the world to use for spring break. Where do you go, and why? ALT FOCUS: Tell your best spring break stories. Frylock EDIT: OP said "anywhere in the country" but that sort of fucks over our Canadian admins, because HAHA spring break in Canada. So let's say the world.
I have never done a "proper" spring break, which is kind of a bummer. Maybe if I had a ticket and a time machine I would go back to Palm Springs in the 80s before Sonny Bono screwed it up for everybody.
It always baffled me how kids took these crazy trips on spring break. Where the hell did they get the money for drinking and partying for a week+? Even more baffling were the people who would fly places. A road trip seems somewhat possible, but plane tickets and shit? I can't believe people's parents pay for this shit. So yeah, I don't really have any crazy spring break stories.
If I were to continue with the entirely hypothetical nature of the focus, I'd say San Francisco because I could ignore the fact that I don't have any money to spend once I actually get there. I've been wanting to go to California for a while now, and I'm pretty sure San Francisco would really agree with me. I know I've been there, but I was really young and I don't remember anything about it. It just seems like a really cool city. If I were to answer it more realistically, though, I'd say Portland, Oregon. I think I'd find the culture of the city insufferable after a few days, but it's not really the destination that matters for this one. One of my closest friends moved out there last fall. His friend's dad is paying him to help fix up his house that he wants to sell, so he's living there for a while while he's working on it and then starting his own farm when the season starts. Besides getting to see my friend, I know it would be the type of vacation I'm in the mood for where I'd get to camp and hike and do stuff with my hands (insert joke here) and generally feel like I'm doing something worthy.
Wanna swap places? I've never been to New York, but I hear it's definitely a place worth checking out. Focus: San Diego or Santa Barbara. Lots of hot girls and both are pretty huge party cities. You could have a lot of fun out here in California.
"Wow my friend Britney was right, this is a really laid back place! Yeah this would be a great place to spend Spring Break!" I did a couple of traditional Spring Break runs. Yes, my college was taken care of through my parents, which let me save up through part time work to go on these. You can have a decent road trip for 500-750 bucks (which isnt skimping). Transportation and lodging is the most expensive but if you get enough people together hotel rooms and gas can be cheap. The first time I went to Miami we planned on staying with a girl who was going to U of M, but we ran into a mutual friend from high school who had a free room a friend had given him when he had to cancel his trip. The second time my brother and I stayed with a college friend of his who was in law school there. When we went to the Orange Bowl a few years ago we stayed at the airport Hilton for free because a friend of ours dad worked in the industry and gave us the hook up. I stayed a week in LA with a buddy who lived out there and traveled to his parents condo on Lake Havasu for a weekend. The point of all of this? Try and find free lodging anyway you can. Pre-buying booze in states/stores that dont charge you out the ass saves too. Honestly, who the fuck pays 8+ dollars a drink at a bar or club? Lake Havasu was fun but you have to go during a Holiday. San Diego was pretty sweet when we swung through it and the girls that came with us to Havasu were from UCSD and could party like rockstars. As for Florida, Daytona Beach fucking sucks, Miami is cool but I had a much better time when we were in Fort Lauderdale.
Hmmm, my spring breaks have been...eventful. Freshman year, my grandfather got extremely sick and everyone thought he was going to pass away. So i went to see him to say my goodbyes. Thankfully he made a full recovery, so while I didn't have a great break, my grandfather didn't die so it was a win. Sophomore year, went back home to have all four of my wisdom teeth pulled, was out of commission for a while. Junior year, grandfather finally passed away, went home for the funeral. Senior year, had a horrible case of tonsillitis, to the point were I could barely breath, much less speak. Graduate school, work, work, work, and more work. If those things didn't happen I had planned to drive to Panama city Sophomore year with my friends and share a hotel room. Junior year my girlfriend's father worked for Carnival cruise line and was able to get us tickets for a 7 day cruise for a very, very good price. Once it became apparent I could barely breath, much less move I told her to give my ticket to one of her friends so she could at least enjoy the cruise. Instead, she decided to stay and take care of me even though I was very contagious. The end result of this was as soon as I got better, she became violently ill and I had to take care of her. If I have a boy, I will encourage him to go to at least one spring break. If I have a girl, I'll fake a horrible illness every year around spring break so she needs to come take care of me. I feel bad for every father whose daughter is on those girl gone wild tapes.
I'm planning to go to Cabo this spring break, a friend of mine's aunt has a timeshare down there that she's letting us stay in. Tickets are $350 round trip so it should be pretty cheap all around. The interesting bit is that none of the guys going are single, there's only three of us at the moment, and I think we're all planning on getting some much needed sun and relaxation.
I don't understand this attitude. Of course you want your kid to learn the value of hardwork and self-sufficiency; however providing you have the money and you deemed your kid to be well rounded why not reward them once a year with a week holiday?
I and 6 mates are going to New York for St Patrick's week. 12th-19th. Does that coincide with spring break/have any effect at all to our partying prospects? We're English/Irish, so spring break isn't really a 'thing' for us, but any chance of girls getting sluttier than usual is good to know about.
Last year I was taking a class that involved clinical rotations in the ER. The first half of the semester was lecture and labs, and the second half of semester was left open to leave time for the rotations—most people did their rotations once a week or so. Instead, I scheduled all my rotations during spring break and got them all done during that span. I had a staggered schedule of day and night shifts for 10 days straight. It was a weird experience but also a ton of fun. This year, I'm hoping to go on a rock climbing road trip. Preferably to Red River Gorge, or, failing that, New River Gorge. I spent my winter break in Rocktown last year bouldering and it was awesome.
Jesus, you fuckers were boring. I started out high school kinda middle-of-the-road in popularity, but by the time I got to senior year, I was friends with everybody. I got invited to spring break with the "Popular Table" and figured it would be a blast. My parents didn't help pay for it, I saved up for a month or so from my two jobs. The whole week and a half cost roughly $850, plus a couple hundred spending money. Spring Break '99, Cancun. You can't get more cliche American spring break than that. Had the best week and a half of my young life. If you don't get laid in Cancun on Spring Break, it's because you're actively trying not to. The best part was that there were two other high schools from our area with kids down there at the same time. At one point I found myself making out on top of a bar with this chick that used to be in my homeroom before she transferred schools in sophomore year. I remember thinking, "Hey, wait. This is Anna. Didn't she used to hate me?" There were only two or three parents along as "chaperones" for our group of about 35 kids, and they pretty much left us the hell alone the whole time. They did go out to dinner with us one night though, about 2 days before we were supposed to leave. I got up to go to that dinner, went to take a piss, and just knew I was getting sick. You know that feeling. Well, I figured, "Drown the virus" and started out dinner with three double shots of tequila. People laughed and clapped me on the back, and a good time was had by all. Until about 1:00 AM, when I could barely stand. I spent the rest of the trip either in bed, or waking up next to the toilet with a knot on my head and splashes of vomit on me, not remembering passing out there. I was still too sick to get off the couch for about the next week and a half. Which is when I stopped drinking tequila.
Every year Sigma Tau Delta, the English honor society (and yes, we know what it spells) would have a convention right around Spring Break time. It would go Wednesday-Sunday, and both times I went it started the Wednesday before Spring Break. In the morning and afternoon there would be a ton of panels where people presented papers they'd written, short stories, collections of poems, whatever. You had to get your submission accepted by the convention, so at least nothing was painfully bad, and you weren't required to go to them, except your own of course. I know, this sounds completely lame. But, it's 5 days with a whole bunch of people who share the same interests, and 70% of them are girls. Also, the school paid for our hotel, airfare, and convention fees, and the convention came with a couple free meals. You give your presentation, answer a few questions from the audience, and then get completely shit faced and go listen to Sarah Vowell read from her newest book. And when you're done, you go home, and still have 7 days of vacation. And sometimes, the dean of the honors college will walk into your hotel room, ask why you "aren't in the fucking hot tub?" and then make a bee line for your gin. Whole lot better than my subsequent Spring Break trips, which tend to involve driving great distances through blizzards (one year driving from Montreal to NYC, and another driving across the length of Kansas).
Last March I went to Aruba for a week for Spring Break, despite paying for college myself, which was only feasible due to heavy saving beforehand and extensive planning. None of us had a lot of money, so we had to go cheap, and we went where we could on our budget. That place just happened to be Aruba. For this trip we booked a vacation rental instead of a hotel, and saved a ton. With the former, it's much cheaper, you're forced a little off of the tourist path and you get the overall feeling of living there instead of just staying there, but with that comes a lot of additional responsibility over a hotel, such as cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, etc. which might not be desirable for some travelers. On a budget though, you really can't beat it, especially if you do dinner and lunch at your place and go out for dinner, saving you a ton of money over a week long stay. The vacation we took cost us about $1000 a piece, $200 each for the vacation rental, $400 for round trip airfare, and the rest was spent on the island on drinks, food, shopping, etc. We were rather heavy on the partying, so the cost jumped up more than any of us wanted to spend (thank god for my tax return), but we did drink every night and most days, which gets real expensive when even the beer from the store costs $50 a case, never mind bar tabs. Alt-Focus: Don't use oils from native plants that you think you recognize. You don't, and that giant plant that looks like Aloe Vera will give you a nasty burn on top of a bad sunburn, instead of supreme relief. Don't make such good friends on an open bar party boat that you drunkenly store your camera in their backpack because you planned to meet up with them later. You won't, and you'll have to have them mail it back to you months later from across the country.
My Spring Breaks consisted of picking up more hours at work while everyone else was away. I don't feel as if I missed anything, as I'm fairly certain I wouldn't have gotten laid anyway. Even in Cancun. Have any of you done the bus trip thing? I have a few friends who would take a Spring Break bus trip from the northeast down to Florida. Their description of the trip made the Bataan death march sound like a holiday. You were talking a 16 hour bus ride, and there were always several people who, if not drunk by the time they stepped onto the bus, were completely wasted by the first hour of the trip. These folks were then throwing up on themselves by hour 4 and pissing themselves by hour 8. And everyone else, while not barfing our pissing, were at the very least wasted by that night. So everyone arrived in FL exhausted, hungry and smelling like ass, and spending the first couple of days recovering from the trip down. I can't say that I see the appeal.
Not a spring break trip, but I took a bus from Quito to the coast of Ecuador, and God was it awful, only about 8 hours though, 16 would have been unbearable. There was a group of maybe 5-6 men in the back who were drunk the whole time, and even got the bus driver to stop 3 times along to way to restock their beer. Chartering a bus with people you know and could set ground rules with would be pretty decent though.
Come on now, we're talking about undergrad here...where people get a month off for Christmas and 2+ months off for it being warm out. An undergrad hardly deserves a spring break vacation. Don't get me wrong, I'm not faulting anyone for having fun. Shit, if anything I'm jealous. I wish I had some cool spring break experiences to talk about.
I think it depends where you're coming from. Since the plane tickets are free I would probably choose the best city that's the farthest away. I would choose somewhere in the Carolinas if you're going east coast. San Diego if you're going west coast. Manhattan Beach or Orange County south of LA would be great too - for a week. That's it.
It's all well and good until someone decides one of those ground rules is that you have to take a beer bong each time you want to use the bathroom. A six hour trip becomes way less fun when the whole bus smells like puke and stale beer. Focus: If you're into snowboarding or skiing, head to a good mountain with a group and you can get the best of both worlds. Tons of good fun riding all day, and an absolute shit show at night. I've done Spring Break trips to Mammoth, Tahoe, and Whistler. While the snow usually isn't the best that time of year, the towns are packed with college kids looking to let loose. Drinking a beer in a hot tub in the snow with a ton of naked strangers beats the hell out of paying $10 for shots of Cuervo at Senor Frogs.
I went to a boarding school so we had almost a month in march to go away to interesting places and to do interesting things. Everyone except us scholarship students that is. I ended up working in a boatyard during the day and drinking every nite which worked out pretty damn well in my opinion. I went to school in Florida for the first two years of college and for some reason we decided going to Virgina Beach in March was a good idea. I lost my sunglasses while tripping on mushrooms on the way up, my friend totaled his car a few blocks from our destination, and one morning I woke up in a roadside ditch while getting rained on. It rained every day we were there and I didn't drink for a couple of days after the ditch incident. Oh, and my bike got stolen a few hours before we left to return to FLA.