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Spring Break is just around the corner and soon hordes of college students will invade all the hot spring break spots. I did the spring break thing once... and that was enough for me.

It was several years ago... a couple of my friends and one of their boyfriends and I went to Orlando, Florida for a 10-day vacation. The planning stage... the plane tickets, the Orlando Rental Home, the rental car... took forever, but finally the day arrived and we were off.

We arrived in Orlando late that same day, after countless layovers all across the country (we got a REALLY good deal on our airline tickets)... we were tired and hungry... but excited nonetheless.

Picking up our rental car should've been our first clue that this was not going to be our dream vacation. We were charged about 3 times the price we'd originally been quoted. Still, we figured a call to the company the next morning would fix everything, so we signed the dotted line and were on our way. (We never did get the rental car thing resolved).

Finding the office of the place that rented us our rental home took several hours.... seriously. We got lost, then couldn't figure out how to retrieve our keys from the lock-box... but several hours later we found it. Around 4 o'clock in the morning.

We spent the next several days at Universal Studios, Islands of Adventure, Busch Gardens... went shopping, saw a dinner theater show (very cool!)... and of course hit the clubs at night (if we had any energy left over). One thing we did learn was to never wear a white bra under a skimpy shirt at a club... especially one that has black light. :( My best friend still blushes everytime we remind her of the story.

Most of the time we were getting lost and drivng in the wrong direction, but we didn't care. We were on our own and we were on Spring Break!

At first, we were all quick to whip out a $20 for gas, groceries, parking...whatever. But about 5 days into, we all started running out of money. I guess that's what happens when you're filling up on gas EVERY SINGLE DAY. We refused to buy a real map, even after getting lost for the 20th time... we figured those little maps on the back of the attraction brochures were good enough for us.

Suddenly, whenever we pulled into a gas station nobody would move or say a word, afraid that if we did, that meant we'd have to pay. We would spend 15 or 20 min. just sitting there... doing nothing, until someobdy finally broke down.

But even the lack of money didn't get us down, we just started charging everything to our credit cards instead. Eventually, the vacation came to an end... we had all had enough of each other and we were fed up with listening to the same Destiny's Child cd in the car. (We all chipped in to buy one CD in Miami... because it seemed pathetic to have a CD player in our car and have no CD's! Pathetic, I know)

On our last day we went to Disney World, but only to pick up a few souveniers to make it LOOK like we'd actually been there. We took pictures of ourselves with Epcot Center in the background, rode the tram around the parking lot and then headed back to our house to clean it up so that we could get our full cleaning deposit back.

Was it worth it? Yes, even though we were all in major debt for the following 6 months paying off our credit cards, it was a truly unforgettable experience (believe me, I've tried to forget!)

Would I do it again? At 27? I think I'm way too old for that kind of stuff and I'd rather just watch it on MTV anyway.

But I'll always have my memories :)

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