Spring Break: It’s a rite of passage for many high school and college students. Did you ever have a crazy spraaang break? Or, were you more the “stay at home and read 20 books” kind of spring breaker?
Erin Wilson: Does Dinah Shore count as a crazy Spring break lol? I went on Spring Break in high school with friends but I never went while I was in college, I missed out! On my high school spring break we would make friends with the older crowd so we could go to their parties and get them to buy us booze.
Kim Hoffman: I lived in Florida for 20+ years of my life. When I took my girlfriend home to visit my parents last March, we were amid the beginning throngs of Spraaang Break like she’d only ever seen in the movies-the Harmony Korine movies. She was mystified to the point of storytelling this scene over and over again to anyone who’d listen back home here in Oregon upon our return. To me, it was another day at the beach. As a kid, before I was of the legal drinking age, I was downing virgin pina coladas at hotel tiki bars just steps from a wet T-shirt contest, not a clue in the world. As I got older, my high school friends and I would go onto the beach when we knew college kids were in town and we’d say we were older, make up a city we were visiting from, and we’d hop from hotel party to hotel party as each became wilder or got broken up by the cops. My girlfriend had no idea what she was in for-especially since the first beach I took her too was more of a wildlife refuge adventure with zero people and shelly shores for miles. At this new beach, she had no idea that the kitschy tie-dye, shell jewelry, head shops were such a thing, or that by 1 pm there would surely be a line of girls vomiting in the bathroom she was trying to use, or that out on the beach, a steel drum band would be playing a modern version of a Maroon 5 song while announcing MORE LIMBO! On the pier, we ran into many a James Franco-white Florida boys who dress in black sweatpants to the beach and have corn rows and baller hats. The only thing missing was Ashley Benson and a gun. But to me, it was just a regular March in Florida.
Grace Chu: I’ve only had one crazy spring break experience, and that was in college my sophomore year. A few of us flew to Los Angeles and crashed at our friend’s house. First we did touristy things, like go to the Hollywood Walk of Fame and Disneyland. Then, on a whim, we decided to drive to San Diego. We picked up a friend and kept driving. Our trip ended in Tijuana, Mexico, where as thrifty/broke American college students, we could drink way more than reasonable or necessary with very little money. One of my friends threw up in a stranger’s drink, so it was time to go. Then another friend was stopped at the Mexican border because the guard thought her Hawaii license was fake. “But Hawaii is a state!” we exclaimed. “If you keep going that way [points a random direction] over water, there’s a U.S. state out there!” I think he got so sick of our drunken geography lessons that he decided to rid Mexico of us. And so we were back on U.S. soil. That’s the story. Nothing too scandalous or interesting, but that’s all I got.
Oh, except Dinah. I went a couple of times and marveled at the debauchery from behind the camera. 10,000 lesbians partying in the desert is quite a spectacle.
Bridget McManus: My senior year of college, my mom surprised me and my roommate (who happened to be my girlfriend) with an all expense paid vacation to Las Vegas. We stayed at the Mirage Hotel and feasted our eyes on lots of topless women, thanks to the showgirl spectacular Jubilee.
Trish Bendix: When I was 16, my sister and I got to pick one friend a piece to bring with us on a road trip down from Michigan to Orlando. I didn’t know I was gay (yet), but when my sister and our two friends wanted to sneak out at night and hang out with boys at our resort, I stayed in and slept instead. They forgot their room key and banged loudly on the locked door in the middle of the night, except I’m a heavy sleeper so I didn’t hear. My parents were right next to us, and my dad was not thrilled when he discovered they’d been out all hours of the night. (My sister was 14.) The three blamed me for not letting them in and we didn’t talk the rest of the trip, including when our van broke down in Atlanta and we had to stay over an extra night while it got fixed. Then we got stuck in car accident traffic in Kentucky for hours with no bathroom in sight, and the three of them peed in a 7-11 Big Gulp cup that splashed on my hand when they handed it up to be tossed out the window. I screamed like I was being stabbed in the gut.
Valerie Anne: I always just went back to Boston for spring break. My friends and I made the most of it though; we’d have Rock Band parties or just go for long car rides, making up dances to our favorite ’90s songs. We might not have traveled the globe, but we had plenty of fun in our own little world.
Lucy Hallowell: I spent a term in Mexico during college. We had a week off in the middle for Semana Santa which is a totally new experience for me. I had always had hockey during school breaks so having a week with nothing to do was a revelation. We traveled to Puerto Angel and Puerto Escondido and drank too much tequila, stayed up too late, and were lazy during the day. Aside from the terrifying and seemingly endless bus rides (where we found out a second driver slept under the bus in one of those luggage compartments) we had an amazing time.
Jenna Duggan-Lykes: I’m pretty sure the only spring break trip I ever took during college was on a Fung Wah bus home to New Jersey. It was a real treat, let me tell you. Once back under my parents’ roof, I usually spent the week hanging out with my dog and trying to sneak-watch as many movies/shows about lesbians that I could without raising any suspicions. I’m a regular old jetsetter, basically.
Dana Piccoli: I don’t want to say that I wasn’t cool in high school, I just wasn’t spring break cool. I was a wannabe riot grrrl couldn’t be bothered to look up from my Sassy Magazine to go Daytona or San Padre. Also, I already knew that a sandy “paradise” filled with rowdy shirtless boys and beer bongs was not going to be my scene. My group of friends without me to Cancun, and they ended up getting into a huge fight when one of them racked up over $500 in long distance charges calling her boyfriend back home in Michigan. Spring break, it tears people apart!
Do you have a memorable spring break?
