Spring Break 2010 consisted of a trip to the East Coast to visit colleges. Cameron, Grant and Charles made the trip. This was our first spring break trip without Travis which was a bit of a bummer, but what you gonna do.
We left on Thursday evening and flew into Philadelphia. Our flight was a little late and we arrived about 12:30 am. Since that was too late to catch the train into the city, we took a cab. To our shock and awe, the hotel that we were staying at was hosting a tatoo convention, which made for some interesting character watching. We visited the University of Pennsylvania on Friday, found a pub where we could get some lunch and then caught a train to DC at 2:30.
Our hotel in DC was close the Capitol and close to Union Station, where our train arrived and where there is Metro station. After relaxing for a bit, we wandered off in search of dinner and ultimately made our way to Chinatown where we ate (of course) Chinese food. The next day we visited Georgetown in the AM and then got a tour of the Capitol in the PM (along with thousands of other tourists). You cannot take water bottles into the Capitol, even if they are empty, so we had to leave our Nalgene bottle in the recycle bin (and ultimately Grant was able to retrive it . . . way to go Grant!!). The Capitol tour was pretty good, but it would have been nice to see more of it. After resting for a while (and after I got in a run), we did a dinner walkabout, finally settling in for dinner around 10:00 pm.
On Sunday we hit the Smithsonian Museums along the National Mall and then took in a play in the evening at the Kennedy Center. We saw Shear Madness, a comedy whodonit where the audience gets to solve the crime. It was very entertaining – definitely worth going to. After the show, we needed a snack so we ducked into a restaurant close to Union Station – someplace close by was important since it was raining. As were headed into the restaurant, a homeless guy asked if we would buy him a burger. If he had asked for money he probably would have gone away empty handed, but we hated to see him go hungry, so we got him hooked up with a burger and he seemed very grateful.
Monday we were back to the college tours. We took the Metro to College Park, MD and visited University of Maryland. It was raining when we got off of the Metro and as we wandered around campus trying to figure out where to go. We sorted it all out and thankfully it stopped raining while we were listening to the admission counselor’s talk. So, no longer raining by the time we went on the campus tour.
On Tuesday, we rented a car at Union Station and drove up to Baltimore, MD where we visited Johns Hopkins University. Hopkins has an interesting policy on first semester grades – they are all “covered” (meaning they show up only as pass/fail). After Hopkins we drove to Charlottesville, VA. When we got to our hotel, Cameron was spinning Grant around in the room chair. We then got in the car to go to dinner, Grant decided that he did not feel so good. Can you guess what happened next? That’s right, he rolled down the rear window and puked all over the side of the car. We were now driving the Puke Mobile.
After puking, Grant recovered his appetite and ate a pretty big dinner. We then went to see a play at the theatre on the UVA campus (Dead Man’s Cell Phone). It was not nearly as funny as Shear Madness, but it was fun to see a play while on campus.
On Wednesday, we did the UVA campus visit and then drove to Durham, NC. Our pool in North Carolina had an indoor pool, so we decided to take advantage of it before heading to dinner. We managed to get to a restaurant by 9:30 and had a relatively unremarkable meal.
On Thursday, we went to the University of North Carolina and to Duke. The Duke admission dean did a great job with his talk. I definitely wanted to go to Duke after listening to it, although I probably would not have been able to get in. After our Duke tour, we drove back to the DC area and stayed in a hotel out by Dulles airport.
On Friday, we went to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. They have an amazing number of aircraft there, but very few (none) that you can actually get into, which was a bit of a bummer. After the museum we grabbed some lunch and headed to the airport for our flight back to Denver.
When we got home we all concluded that it was our best college trip to the East Coast ever.
