I had just spent two weeks exploring Italy. I was sitting at the Trevi Fountain after finishing a giant banana and biscotti gelato. Life was good. That is how you do a spring break.
This is me this spring break
I'm sitting on a cow outside the ice cream store in Bryn Mawr.
Alright, so it was no Italy. Last year's spring break set a spring break standard. We had big plans for break this year, we were going to road trip to Colonial Williamsburg by way of Dinosaur Land. It was going to be epic. It never happened. My friends hate fun. People have come up to me on campus and asked why my friends hate having fun so much, they are KNOWN for not enjoying fun. I secretly enjoy fun and often sneak off to have some, but around them I have to pretend that I also hate fun.
It was decided that instead of going on an epic spring break trip we would stay at school and take day trips. This would allow people to write their thesis and still feel like they're having fun. My friends didn't think ahead and write that thing last semester. Doesn't that sound like fun?
I didn't think so, so I went home for the first part of spring break to have some real fun of my own. Unfortunately once I came home I spent most of my break watching the football players across the street and their new puppy, rather than having that "spring break fun" I had assumed I would have. I did go to a child's birthday party, which are really underrated. Little children are hilarious! They say the first thing that comes to their minds and little four year old girls are incredibly promiscuous these days (I searched the thesaurus for a good five minutes to find that word and it's still not perfect...but you get the idea, they're flirts). Also, added bonus, "Batman" came to the party and while his face was partially covered by a mask I'm 98% sure I knew him. He got an attitude with me when I asked him if he knew Superman.
The point of the story is I couldn't spend the week going to children's birthday parties, the authorities would get suspicious. So plans were made for me to return and day trips to happen.
It was decided that we would go to Amish Country and somewhere else for our trips. Amish Country? Really? I say spring break day trips and you pick Amish Country? I have no answers. While I was home I shared this news with the office who reacted to the news as if I had told them that I was going to go beat kittens continuously for all of spring break. All work was dropped as Michelle started pulling up websites to find better trip plans. Andrew came out of no where with a guide book that listed day trip destinations along the East Coast. Suggestions came flying from everywhere. After careful consideration I decided on a list of factory tours to suggest to the crew. Ultimately we decided on the Herr's Potato Chip factory tour (on our way to Amish Country, they weren't yielding on that one) and (drivers choice) Yuengling Factory. I sadly decided against Eric's suggestion of throwing my friends in the car, locking the doors and driving them to Pittsburgh against their will. I'm pretty sure my friends would charge me with kidnapping if that happened...no mercy from them.
On Tuesday night I sent detailed instructions to my friends to be ready for an 11:30 departure from Bryn Mawr. We had 1 o clock reservations at the Herr's Factory and I hate being late for anything. Everyone was ready to roll come Wednesday morning. Paige called shotgun and was given map duty. She asked for DJing duties and was denied, more on that later. The directions said it would take an hour to reach the factory. After driving for what seemed like an hour (it wasn't nearly an hour, I just have no sense of time) we were in some sort of limbo zone between suburban Philadelphia and Amish Country. Not exactly rural, but not developed. Just a strange, strange zone. I decided that we had definitely made a wrong turn and was just about to turn around when we saw a sign for the factory. We pulled into the parking lot at exactly 1 o clock and raced inside. We gave our name to the front desk who told us that our tour group was right inside the auditorium watching the opening film so we could sneak on it. We carefully opened the door to find a woman and her daughter sitting in a fairly large auditorium, apparently these tours aren't too popular.
After being joined by two mothers and their gaggle of children our guide started the film for us. Nicky loved it. The star of the film was a chipmonk puppet named Chip Herr, but everyone called him Chipper. Here's my problem with that. That's not a nick name, that's a mispronunciation of his name. That's like me saying "My name is Marianna, but everyone calls me Maryanna". Nicky didn't care, she loves a good puppet. The film told the story of the Herr family and their contributions to the local town, which apparently include a giant Christmas light show and a monkey. Ari thought the monkey was part of some Herr sponsored petting zoo until we all came to the agreement that if we were running a petting zoo a monkey wouldn't exactly be an animal we'd choose to put in there.
Our tour guide stopped the film and began the tour. Her enthusiasm level on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being me about to get on a boat and 10 being me about to see the elephants at the zoo, ranked at about 3, or me getting the motivation to leave my room when it's raining. Her life goal clearly was not to lead tours of the Herr's potato chip factory.
The tour began on a high note for me when the little girl on our tour skipped ahead of her and she barked "Hey! Number one rule for the tour! Everyone stays behind me!" I let out a big guffaw at that one. As soon as we made our first stop Ari started asking questions. She likes to learn apparently. Our tour guide was less than pleased. She was even more peeved when we reached another stop and Ari started to grill her on the proper way to make Party Mix. The guide thought she was referring to the "party mix" that they give the area cows made up of broken chip bits. This would make sense as she had just been telling us about that. Ari was referring to her favorite snack, Party Mix, a chip based snackie that is not even made by Herr's. I'm going to have to side with the tour guide on this one.
At the end of the tour we were all given chips fresh off the line. We all gave a heavy sigh when we realized that from that moment on chips just would never be good enough ever again. They were fantastic. Our guide tossed us a bag of free chips and let us loose in the gift shop. There we stocked up on defective bags of chips being sold for 17 cents. Win. Ari also looked for a present to give Drew's parents as she was visiting them later this week...she unfortunately decided against the potato bottle opener key chain or the chocolate covered potato chips.
We're going to stop here for now. For some strange reason it has literally taken me all day to write this much. I also just took some Benadryl and do not want to be held responsible for anything I write for the next 4-6 hours. Come back later this weekend for parts 2, 3 and possibly 4 of Spring Break 2k9.
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1 comment:
Ari is having way too much fun on that cow.
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