First-Year Trip or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Man-Made Snow
The day started with a coupla cups of coffee and me, precariously driving a 15-passenger van down a Connecticut highway, the air occasionally punctuated by gasps of fear from my poor classmates. Hey, what do you want from me, I drive a 2-door hatchback.
It was my school's first-year trip and we were off to hit the snow! Ok, man-made snow since it hasn't snowed properly all winter. Once you get over the bizarre sight of a pretty white hill running directly into a grassy field, it all starts to seem almost normal.
A cross-country skiing lesson done I headed off for the most serious part of the adventure: sledding. Apparently I had never properly sledded before. "Proper" sledding as it turns out involves human beings throwing themselves in various positions onto an inner tube and hurtling down a hill. This is already inherently awesome but becomes even greater when you attach yourselves to your compatriots and get a mega-caravan of a dozen inner-tubes and fifteen people careening down the hill, little children and their parents jumping desperately out of the way with their puny sleds.
As it turns out, one can't possibly think about grant proposals, Spanish conjugations or anything that's not how to avoid eating snow in such a situation. Why's this only for little kids again?
A strength-restoring cup of hot chocolate and we were back in the death van, a relic of the 1980's that had clearly spent most of its life hauling logs or some other equally scarring activity. Only one more near-accident caused by me and we were home, trying to remember why we were so busy and important just yesterday.
It was my school's first-year trip and we were off to hit the snow! Ok, man-made snow since it hasn't snowed properly all winter. Once you get over the bizarre sight of a pretty white hill running directly into a grassy field, it all starts to seem almost normal.
A cross-country skiing lesson done I headed off for the most serious part of the adventure: sledding. Apparently I had never properly sledded before. "Proper" sledding as it turns out involves human beings throwing themselves in various positions onto an inner tube and hurtling down a hill. This is already inherently awesome but becomes even greater when you attach yourselves to your compatriots and get a mega-caravan of a dozen inner-tubes and fifteen people careening down the hill, little children and their parents jumping desperately out of the way with their puny sleds.
As it turns out, one can't possibly think about grant proposals, Spanish conjugations or anything that's not how to avoid eating snow in such a situation. Why's this only for little kids again?
A strength-restoring cup of hot chocolate and we were back in the death van, a relic of the 1980's that had clearly spent most of its life hauling logs or some other equally scarring activity. Only one more near-accident caused by me and we were home, trying to remember why we were so busy and important just yesterday.