Senior tripping

So it's time to blog the senior trip. We're currently on the bus on our way to Ocean City, MD. I've never been to this place and am very much looking forward to it.

Ocean City was not our original destination, and our path to that location twisted and turned through bedbug reports, careening between no options and too many options, and finally landing in the OC, thanks in part to an offpeak travel time and a lousy economy.

My job here was to plan and organize the trip. I think most people know that me and the word 'organize' have a relationship that's uneasy at best. Planning is fine, and I can keep a lot of things going simultaneously, but not in a way that anyone would call precise and organized.

As the trip goes on I can pass along some more of the backstory, but today we arrived at school to find that we had 3 few kids than anticipated, due to illness and mysterious doings. Most of the kids were here on time, as was the bus, so everything proceeded and we were ready to go when I realized we were lacking our lunch. This is the perfect example of why I hate being in charge. If we ended up in Maryland with no food, it was all on me.

The caterer had said that we were going to have sandwiches for lunch today because he couldn't get to the hotel in time to prepare a meal. Beyond that, I had no information. I didn't know if he was bringing them or if we needed to load it on the bus. Once I found out that we were bringing it, I had to go down to the school kitchen, bang on the door until an extremely put out (though totally helpful) young woman let me in.

Upon entering, I could see that our food was in a state of semi-readiness. This was not what I'd anticipated, but we were able to fill a cooler with ice, add sandwiches, and then...stare at this big heavy thing and wonder how we were going to get it to the bus. There was no handtruck or proper dolly anywhere, so we lifted the cooler onto one of those wheeley (wheelie?) things you use to pile up a bunch of folding chairs. This was okay as long as we didn't hit any kind of irregularity on the ground, which worked better inside than out. Any time we hit even a small bump, the wheelie stopped and the cooler kept going (that's physics, folks). Eventually, we gave up and started carrying things.

The end result of this was my getting completely soaked and more than a little irritated, but ultimately we made it onto the bus with everything and we're off! More to come.