It was the week following our win over Michigan State, and we had another trip planned. We were to face off against the Fighting Illini on their home turf in nearby Champagne. With a drive of just over 80 minutes, the University of Illinois  is the closest Big Ten school to Purdue (I’d always assumed IU was our closest neighbors). It was going to be the first time I’d ever traveled west (not counting Hawaii). I’d been to Florida, South Carolina, Ohio, and New York, but even though Illinois is right next door, I’d never been there.

We left on a Friday morning, and I skipped my Physics recitation that day. It was just a review day, so attendance wasn’t mandatory. Instead of riding up separately this time though, we took a pair vans that hold about 8 passengers. There were only 10 or so managers who rode up early, with another 4 coming later with the team. We broke into teams of 5, and loaded the vans with our overnight bags, a cooler of water, juice, and soda, and grabbed some walkie talkies to communicate if our vans got separated.

It was a fairly quick and uneventful trip out to Champagne. Indiana/Illinois in the middle of a cold November is typically gray and barren, with gnarly leafless trees breaking up an otherwise monotonous stretch of empty, harvested fields. From what I saw of Illinois’s campus, it was pretty similar to Purdue’s. Upon arriving however, we went straight to the stadium.

I began with my crew what would be the first of many pregame equipment rituals. We scouted out the locker room, which was quite nice compared to the cramped box MSU shoved us in. Our huge semi arrived minutes later, and we set about unloading the various trunks and carts loaded with gear. We dressed around 70 guys for our travel team, and each player’s stuff needed to be unloaded and placed in their locker. A couple guys would sort though the name tags and decide where to put each group of players, while another group of managers would toss the bags to their required location. The remaining workers (I was in this group) went through and unloaded each player’s bag, so that when they arrived, they’d have all their stuff.

We’d double check to make sure we didn’t forget anything; we tried to check the bags before we packed them too, but sometimes the players managed to leave behind a pair of gloves or one of their knee pads. We always packed tons of spares. Once everything was neat and orderly, we’d go through and check for dirty shoes and helmets and give them a good scrubbing, sometimes giving them new decals or making a face mask change. A few of us would go through and apply double sided tape to some of the linemen’s pads, which not only helped to keep their jerseys smooth, but also made them harder to grasp and manhandle. (Later, we’d get this cool velcro that served the same purpose with much better results). Assuming someone had gone through and prepped the coach’s room, we were pretty much done. We’d get the trunks and the carts out of the way and set up a mobile “EQ” (short for equipment room) for tomorrow’s pre-game.

We usually had at least an hour or so left before the team would arrive, so we’d take the time to eat something from one of the local restaurants and tour the stadium. Since we had access to the visiting locker room, we were able to go check out the field itself, and would take some of the game balls down to the field and throw them around and skip them off the turf to break them in. We’d just run around and play a quick game of two-hand touch, or just throw passes to one another. I always loved this time on the field, because as an “inside” guy, I never got to partake in the daily games of touch football that the other guys had before practice.

This was also my first time to play the beloved game “Hack,” which was invented by some of the older managers, including a former elementary schoolmate of mine, Mookie. It’s an interesting (and extremely fun) game that mixes hackysack with dodgeball. We’d take an old kicker ball and take about half the air out of it, and then everyone would get in a circle. Someone would serve the ball into the circle, and it was up to everyone else to keep the ball in the air using feet, forehead, or chest – no hands allowed. After three different players had touched the ball, you could grab it out of the air, and then your goal was to hit the nearest guy as hard as you could with it. If you hit him (or her) you would get a point and they’d lose one; unless he or she caught it, in which case you’d lose a point, and they’d gain one. You played until someone won by getting ten points, but the game ended if someone “lost” by getting negative ten points.

So, we circled up on the 50 yard line of the Illini’s home field around their big orange I and played a game. It was chilly out, but it didn’t matter, because the game keeps you moving frantically. I was a favorite target since I was the new guy, and because I’m pretty short. It hurts taking a football to the face, even if it’s flat, and especially when it’s cold out. To the delight of my fellows, this happened on a frightfully regular basis. It stung, but I still loved the game. I did think it was strange that the ground crews didn’t care that we were playing games in the middle of their field, but at most of the stadiums we’d visit, they would gather around and watch and laugh at us. The only stadiums that cared that we were on the field were ones that had real grass turf (unlike Illinois who had fake at the time).

I don’t think anyone won or lost that round though before the team arrived. The coaches and players did their quick walk through, where they’d check out the field and the facilities, and on rare occasions, speak with a reporter about the next day’s game. Then, they’d all hop on the bus and head out to the hotel they’d be staying at for the night, which was usually within 20 minutes of campus.

While the players were sequestered to meetings, dinner, a movie, and then bed, we managers had the rest of the night to ourselves. Generally, we’d pick a place to eat, and then the older kids would go hang out at the local bars, with the younger kids staying up to drive them around. As long as no one was an idiot when they went out (yes, singing the Purdue Fight Song is highly frowned upon at other schools, if you will believe it), and as long as everyone showed up on time the next morning, our bosses were okay with this. Kickoff was at noon the next morning, so we had to be there at 7am per the “5 before kickoff rule,” and I don’t remember anyone being too keen on going out.

I do remember going to a nice mom and pop restaurant across the street from our hotel. I believe I had spent the week prior to the trip telling everyone that I’d get a grilled cheese for dinner, and it was pretty good, along with some very tasty chicken soup. We hung out and joked around for a little while, gently bickering with our waitress who had discovered we were from Purdue. A couple near our table over heard, and we joked around with them too about the game. There was some good-natured trash talk, but the people of Champagne were decent folks. We all headed back to the hotel, and I remember just curling up on the floor and going to sleep.

It was still dark out, and spitting snow as we left for the stadium the next morning. I believe we ran by McDonald’s on the way so a few guys could get coffee, OJ, or hashbrowns to tide us over for the game. Once we got there, my duties were pretty light. The other managers had to go out and set up the sidelines for their various positions, with some of them performing the all-too important task of making sure the headsets worked for pressbox-to-field communications. I’d pretty much stand around and flip through the game program until the players arrived, and then my job was to hand out wrist bands, hand warmers, sleeves if Coach Tiller said it was okay to wear them, and help guys put on their jerseys. I know that last one sounds a little weird, but the jerseys were designed to be tight and with some of these guys well over 300 lbs, they really struggled pulling the uniforms on. It was a dangerous affair, and I can say that I punched a few guys in the face on accident. That’s probably the only time I’ll ever get away with hitting a guy three times my size and living to tell the tale. (Sorry, Heygood!)

I remember the players being pumped for the game. Sure we were destined for a bowl game, but if we kept winning, we’d go to a better bowl game. We were picked to win, but Illinois would still be a tough test. They had only won 2 games sure, but they were close ones, and in their quarterback “Juice” Williams, they had a talented guy who was struggling with being consistent. Luckily, our guys knew to take a guy with a nickname like Juice seriously, and forced him to have a below average game. It was neck-and-neck for a while, but we eventually pulled away towards the end, winning 42-31. I remember slapping fives with Al Royal, number 81, and laughing. He was one of the first players to remember me by my name, so I’ll always remember him. We were 7-4, and with another couple wins, we’d be looking at a trip to Texas or Florida in December for a bowl game. After spending the last 3 hours standing in sub-freezing temperatures, the thought of going to either was even more attractive.

We had the Hoosiers next week at home, whom we beat handily to keep the bucket in our possession. Then everyone was traveling out to Hawai’i to play the Warriors at Aloha stadium. Sadly, since I was still one of the newer guys, I had to miss this trip, but I remember staying up til past 4 in the morning to watch the guys play in a close game that they would end up losing by just a mere touchdown. We were selected to go to the Champs Sports Bowl in Orlando, where we’d face the Maryland Terrapins, who’d had a good year in the ACC.

I’ll talk briefly about the bowl trip in the next post, but I’ve already discussed Florida twice. I’ll also mention another Ohio trip where we faced the Toledo Rockets, but the focus of the post will probably be about my first trip to Minnesota, which is probably my favorite of all of my road trips while at Purdue.

During my senior year, I had taken a computer graphics course, and was so completely interested in it, that I wanted to learn more. I looked into Purdue’s Computer Graphics course and found that I would learn all sorts of cool stuff: Photoshop, 3D rendering, and website design were a few things that caught my eye. I’d been a hobby web designer with a cheap little angelfire site (does it still exist?) and was intrigued by the prospect of getting better at it. I also was interested in engineering, having the dream once of becoming an aircraft engineer and spend my life designing fighter jets. After taking AP physics though, my interest in engineering waned. I couldn’t picture myself doing it every day for several years. Nevertheless, Purdue seemed to have everything I wanted in an academic institution.

However, there was a third reason I wanted to go to Purdue, that I don’t admit very often. But I’m telling you, Internet! I loved being a football manager. Some of my fondest memories from high school are standing on the sidelines and rooting for my friends, hour long bus rides to other schools, stirring gatorade with my bare hand in 35 degree weather…. Football was great. I wanted to do it in college too, thinking maybe, just maybe, I could be a football manager for a living. I had a desire to stay instate, and I still wanted to get a great education. But I wanted a team with a great football program too. That ruled out Ball State, ISU, and IUPUI. IU’s football team was atrocious. Notre Dame was too snooty. Rose-Hulman had great academics, but again, I wasn’t interested in being a Fightin’ Engineer. I was going to be a Boilermaker.

So, half of my decision to go to Purdue had nothing to do with school at all. Of course, I explained to Dad and his mother that I was going because they were ranked in the top 10 schools in the country in what I wanted to learn (they were die hard IU fans). I had known a couple guys from Speedway who actually worked on the equipment staff at Purdue, so I had my “in” to the program, and during a campus visit, I signed on as a volunteer.

I started as soon as I got to Purdue too. I’d go in a couple afternoons a week and do laundry, wash cleats, and unpack and organize new equipment. It was so much more involved than high school football. There were 100 or more players who would need everything from new gloves to help finding their helmets. You’d be surprised how sloppy some of these guys could be. One night, we’d stay late into the evening and have helmet night, where we’d re-decal and repaint the helmets to like nice for gameday. One of the local pizza shops donated pies to the cause, and it easily became my favorite night of the week.

As a volunteer, it meant that I wasn’t getting paid for working, and it meant that I was only going to attend 2 of the home games that year. It was cool with me – I was just thrilled to be working with a good Big Ten football team. See, the years prior to my arrival, Coach Tiller had done some amazing things at Purdue. A couple of quarterbacks – Drew Brees (who incidentally had proved to me that Boilers aren’t so bad) and Kyle Orton – had made some noise in the conference, and Purdue was a legitimate threat to some of the perennial favorites. I was eager to see how things would go during my stay.

Unfortunately, not so great. We ended up only winning 4 games that season, but I got to witness one of the wins in Ross-Ade, against the Michigan State Spartans. I was also present for a game against Iowa, but they handled us easily. The season was over, just like that (we beat IU again for the bucket, though), and I had next year to look forward to. I was still on quasi-volunteer status, but would be working all of the home games, and could go on some of the closer road trips.

I worked camp for the first time, heading up 2 weeks before classes even began to stay in the Union hotel. Here I experienced college football two-a-days for the first time. I had done those in high school, but again, the amount of work involved just doesn’t compare. I was working 12 hour days, from 6am to 6pm, doing laundry and counting brand-new cleats. I organized countless crates of practice gear, and individually rolled over a thousand pairs of socks. I’d earned the nickname “Diddles” or “dids,” short for Beau Diddley. I was feeling more involved as a manager, and though it was a lot of work, I enjoyed it.

The season went on, and we did well under Curtis Painter. I got to spend all of the home games on the sidelines, which ironically were my easiest day. My boss Tim would always say that we did all our work through the week so we could have game day off, as equipment guys, and it was so right. Once the ball was kicked, we pretty much just got to watch the game, unless someone lost a cleat, or a chinstrap broke or lost a shoulder pad buckle. But thanks to inspections throughout the week, these things rarely happened. Even the water duty – which I was used to doing in high school – was taken care of by the athletic trainers. Of course, being one of the shortest guys on the field, I had to watch the games on the jumbo tron. I just couldn’t see over the behemoth players.

Finally, after a few missed road trips (because of strict travel rules on the part of teams, or a tests, as in the case of the Iowa game), I was going to head out with the guys for our game against Michigan State in East Lansing, as it was only about a 5 hour drive from West Lafayette. Since I was still one of the young kids, I had to share a room with Schmie and the Mullinator, and I would have to sleep on the floor. I didn’t mind, I was just excited to be on the road.

I actually rode up with a couple of other new guys, Ross and Stu, in Ross’s old beat up Jimmy. Since we were new guys, and extra bodies, there wasn’t room for us on the buses, and we couldn’t get class excuses, so we had to come up later than the team. It had rained in his car the night before, and it smelled musty. But, he had tried to mask the smell with strawberry air freshener, so the overall smell of his car was something like stale strawberry ice cream. We heard the song “Smack That” by Akon at least a dozen times, and it became our official trip anthem.

It was my first time in Michigan, but East Lansing was really a lot like home in Indianapolis. It was just much, much colder. When we arrived, it was in the low twenties and snowing in the city, with steam rising from every manhole we passed. We arrived well after the team, and they were already out for dinner. We were only 20 and it was customary for the managers of age to go explore the local bar scene. So, Ross, Stu, and I drove to a nearby movie theater to go see a movie. We settled on “Flags of our Fathers” which actually turned out to be a pretty decent movie. But, we were pretty beat, so we went back to the hotel to get some sleep.

It was customary to be at the field 5 hours before kickoff, but the game wasn’t until 3:30 on November 4, 2006. I remember the veterans being excited because it meant they could sleep in before the game (usually we had to be ready to go by 7am). It was still bitterly cold, and we donned long johns, thick down-filled coats, and woolly stocking caps. They didn’t help much, but luckily, I was the guy in charge of hand warmers, so at least my fingers were cozy.

It was a grueling game, and I was actually put in charge of answering the defensive calls from the coordinator. He’d call down to a little phone we taped to a table, and I’d answer. He’d shout the name of the player who had let him down, and I’d hand it off, watch the player in question wince and repeat “yes, sir” a hundred times and hang it up, disgusted. We were down 15-14 with about 5 minutes to play, and tensions were high. We’d won five games that season, and with a sixth we’d become bowl-eligible. We’d had some tough losses to ranked Notre Dame, Wisconsin, and Iowa, and just come off a shut out loss to Penn State. Our kicker had been struggling, so we put in a guy who, as a senior, was making his first-ever collegiate kick. He put one through with about 4:30 to go, and put us in the lead 17-15.

Sparty, their ridiculous foamy mascot, tried to sneak up on me – I saw him tiptoeing at me out of the corner of my eye – but he tripped on a wire and skulked away. I remember laughing to myself at that, but I continued smiling. I knew we were going to win the game at that point. The life in the defense was contagious. They weren’t going to let the game end in another close loss. We were going bowling.

I remember not caring about my wind-seared cheeks as I dodged flying jerseys and dancing football players in Michigan State’s hilariously small visiting locker room. We had crammed about 70 guys into a 100 square foot room – and when some of those guys are in excess of 6 and a half feet and 400 pounds…that’s quite an accomplishment. You’d think they’d be grouchy and uncomfortable, but no…Coach Tiller had canceled Sunday practice, and you just can’t be in a bad mood when you get a day off from work.

My stay in Michigan had been brief, but it was a blast. We had won my first ever road game, and it meant we’d be going somewhere over winter break. The better we played, the more likely we’d end up in Texas or Florida for a nice warm-weather bowl berth, so we needed to keep our noses to the grindstone as we headed into our next game against Illinois.

My next post in this little series will discuss my first visit to Illinois. I hope to get it out soon, but you see how things have been. Thanks for your patience, at any rate!

The challenge comes in many forms. First, you have to track down an agent. It’s not hard to find them using google and a few directories, but then you have to read bios and blogs and requirements and preferences. This is the easiest part of the process, but it’s still important. Which agent is not only a good fit for you, but also for your story? What are their quirks and pet peeves? These are necessary details for the query letter; it helps to know how to approach the agent by telling them what they need to hear, and neglecting what they don’t. I spent several hours researching in this phase to figure out who to send to and learning how to send it.

Next, you have to describe the story that you just spent the last several months writing and editing in the space of two or three paragraphs. You’d think it’d be easy to do that, but here’s some perspective: you’ve written almost 90,000 words in the last eight months and you have to pare it down to about 300. Being so intimately involved with the story, you feel like everything is important, when a lot of things simply won’t matter to an outsider who hasn’t laid eyes on your work. You have to decide what to mention and what to leave out of your synopsis, and it’s tough.

To add to the stress, you know that you’re competing against hundreds of other people whenever you query. In a given week, agents will read between 100 and 200 queries, and request partial or full manuscripts from about 1% of those. With stats like that, you’ve got to stand out. You need a snappy query and an eye-catching synopsis. You need to intrigue, but being too over the top could kill your query. Oh, and did you follow all of the submission guidelines? I spent a week and a half writing and rejecting my own queries, and after about a dozen revisions finally wrote a letter I found acceptable. And even if I wrote the best query in the world, there’s still a chance that the agent simply won’t like my idea, and there’s really nothing I can do about that.

The whole query process is like a job interview on steroids. It takes a lot of work and even a little luck to get through this stage. Everyone wants to be published, but it’s a business, and the agents and publishers need to be confident they will make money by working with you. It was tough to write the query letter; harder than writing the entire novel.

Am I confident my proposal will be accepted? I’m being careful not to get my hopes up, simply because it’s such a difficult process. But I am confident that I did every thing I could with my abilities to give myself the best chances. Now it’s just a couple weeks of waiting to see if the agents I queried are interested in more. If they aren’t, I’ll try to correct any problems, and query other agents out there. If by some small miracle they are interested in more, it’ll be a several-months process of waiting to see if we want to shop for publishers.

Either way, the journey is far from over, and I’m excited to see what happens next, regardless of whether I get a rejection or a request. I’ll be sure to post updates here as they come. Wish me luck!

It had been a few years since our last vacation, my parents had gotten divorced, and I had gone on to high school. It was in the fall of my senior year when Mom floated the idea of us going on a family vacation. She had quite a bit of money stashed away that she’d been sitting on for a while, and decided it was time we all took a trip. She wanted to take us someplace warm, since we would be going the day after Christmas, and would actually spend New Year’s Eve there. She surprised us all by telling us she wanted to go to Hawaii.

I was overjoyed by this turn of events; I’d always wanted to visit the Aloha State. I’ve always enjoyed fresh sea air and sunshine, and the islands obviously have those in spades. Plus, I was interested in ukuleles, and had taken to listening to Jake Shimabukuro’s Walking Down Rainhill; I was determined to buy one of the instruments while we were over there. We left on December 26. 2004, and thanks to ice on the plane and runway, we were 2 hours behind schedule taking off. We were heading up to Chicago for our connection, and after our 35 minute flight, we sprinted from one end of the terminal to the other and were the very last people to board the plane, along with a few other families destined for Honolulu.

We were riding in a 777 which is an absolutely huge aircraft, with nine seats and about 200 rows. The flight from Chicago was a staggering 9.5 hours nonstop, and I was “lucky” enough to end up in the very middle seat in the middle row of the plane. I heard the guy in front of us tell my sisters that he thought it was great that they plane had waited for us, but he was going to be missing his connection to Tokyo, Japan, to see his fiancee. Us being about 15 minutes late had set him back 17 hours, but I remember being impressed by his utter calm in the face of things.

Of course, my mood was just as immovable. I was going to Hawaii. Nothing could dampen my spirits; not the ice or the hours of delays, or the even longer hours on the plane. Even the lasagna they served us later on the flight was delicious. We watched two movies on the way out to the islands, and while I forget the first one, the second flick was A Shark’s Tale, which just isn’t Finding Nemo. I sat next to my mom, and an extremely attractive girl about my age who wore a flower in her hair. I remember the elderly woman next to me said “well it looks like you’re going to sit next to a pretty girl instead!” and traded seats with her daughter. She was lovely alright, but with mom sitting just to my right, it totally killed any desire to flirt with her.

Mom is a talker; or rather other people tend to make her a talker. The family across the aisle from her started a conversation with her that pretty much lasted the entire flight. And with my sisters sitting in front of me, I was on my own to entertain myself. Luckily, I had gotten my first ever iPod for Christmas – one of the black and red U2 special edition ones – and loaded it up with music to keep me company on the way out. My official anthem for the trip was Marron5′s Sunday Morning, because I felt like the sunny melodies captured my mood perfectly. I was going to Hawaii!

We landed in Honolulu International, and despite having left Chicago at 10 in the morning, it was only the middle of the afternoon in Hawaii, since we’d traveled with the sun on the way out. We were greeted by a big Hawaiian man, who put leis around our necks and kissed my mother and sisters, and then he looked at me and grinned, saying “How bout I just shake your hand braddah?” and then he helped us lug our bags out to the curb to our shuttle. While we waited he told us about how he envied us mainlanders because it was always too hot in Hawaii. We laughed because the hot weather was a commodity.

We rode the shuttle from the airport to the west end of Oahu, about 30 minutes away to the famed beaches of Waikiki. One thing that I really love about Hawaii is how it’s a fairly busy city, but the natural foliage still mingles with the buildings, so the urban areas still manage to feel alive. The wind constantly rushes off the Pacific Ocean smelling fresh and clean, and it’s air that you can just breathe. We arrived at our hotel on the very edge of Waikiki, just across from the Honolulu Zoo. I was surprised to find that our hotel had no front door, but after feeling the breeze roll into the lobby, it suddenly made sense. How could they spoil that with a door?

Our room was all the way up on the 17th floor, and we rode up the elevator with an elderly Japanese couple, who grinned and waved, and attempted to tell us hello in their rough English. After we dragged our luggage into our room, we all collapsed on the fold out couch and wondered what to do for dinner. Naturally, we settled on something that didn’t require us to travel anywhere, having been on the go for the last 15 hours. We ordered pizza from a local place down in the heart of Waikiki. It was a spicy Chicago style pizza, and it was extremely tasty. We traded turns in the shower, unpacked our things, and struggled to stay awake at least until the sun had set and then slept.

The next day was cloudy, but we went to the beach anyway. We were admittedly a little worried about being down there, since just the day before the huge catastrophic tsunami of 2004 had ravaged Southeast Asia, and we weren’t terribly far from the epicenter of the earthquake that had caused it. We hung out on the beach for several hours, watching a Japanese couple and their two toddlers build a sand castle, and enjoying the complete lack of sea gulls. Surfers beyond some man-made tide walls were taking advantage of the choppy water, and there were at least two games of sandbar football going on.

I was perfectly content laying around and doing nothing, but my sisters were determined to go shopping. And in Waikiki, there are shops of all kinds. There were upscale designer clothing stores, and shops devoted entirely to t-shirts. One portion of the street was dedicated to street vendors who sold shark tooth necklaces and pearls collected from the Hawaiian waters. Ubiquitous ABC Convenience stores were on practically every corner made for a great place to stop and grab a snack or soda, and just about every restaurant from McDonald’s to the Cheesecake Factory to the California Pizza Kitchen has a franchise located in Waikiki.

One day we rode the trolley out to the Ala Moana Shopping Center, which is an open air mall, with palm trees growing in the open plazas between stores. The trolley was one of my favorite parts of Honolulu, since you could just sit and enjoy the breeze while seeing the rest of the lovely city pass by. Our driver told jokes and stories the entire time we rode out to the mall, and pointed out that the houses that sat on the mountains in the distance were in the shape of Elvis if you squinted your eyes just right.

We didn’t spend all of our time in stores, however. Mom wanted to visit the Polynesian Cultural Center, which is supposed to be one of the coolest things to see in all of Hawaii, but without a car, we were stuck using the buses that looped throughout Honolulu. One day when it was mostly rainy, we decided to ride out to Pearl Harbor and hopefully get to take a tour. They have a limit on the number of tickets they give out per day, and if you don’t make it there by a certain time, you’re out of luck. Little did we know that the bus ride out would take us about an hour and a half. Unlike our shuttle ride a few days prior, we had to share the bus with other people, who were constantly needing to be dropped off. We made it to the Harbor after almost running over a poor girl who was taking drivers ed and merged in front of the bus without looking, only to stand in line for another half hour.

We got to explore the tiny museum there, and could see the USS Arizona monument and a few other retired battleships sitting in the water, but could only watch helplessly as the final transport out to the monuments took off without us. We were too late. Mom was pretty disappointed, but I was okay with it. I was in Hawaii.

Halfway through the week, we were switching islands. We would be traveling from Oahu to Maui, and spend the final half of our week over there. Naturally the day we were switching islands was the only day of sunshine we’d have the entire time we were there, but we still killed an hour on the beach before the shuttle collected us to take us to the airport. I remember taking the sky way, and seeing the palms skirting the edges of the bridge we were on, seeing the blacktop sparkle under the tropical sun, and my eyes must have lit up because mom asked “You’re going to move here, aren’t you?” I grinned and said “yeah, that’d be nice, if I could afford it.”

We flew a tiny jet liner by way of Aloha Airways where we were all introduced to guava juice for the first time. We all thought it was delicious, and would try to get it at restaurants whenever we could from that point forward. It’s only about a 40 minute flight from Oahu to Maui, and while they’re only a couple hundred miles apart, the two islands are drastically different. While Oahu is dominated by skyscrapers and traffic, Maui is a little more rural. Two tall mountains create a valley, that, thanks to the mountains, is so dry, it almost looks like a desert. While we were on this island, we would actually have a rental car, so we went and picked that up and headed to the west side of Maui to a little town called Lahaina.

The drive out was pretty cool, with the road winding around the edge of the island so that you had the big mountain on one side, and rocky cliffs dropping into the bright blue ocean on the other. Once you get around the bend of the island, the landscape transforms from rocks and shrubs the lush foliage one would typically associate with an islands, and you are struck by how drastically the mountains affect the ecosystems of Maui.

Lahaina was perhaps just as dramatically different from the city we had just left. It was smaller, mellower, less busy. There fewer people and fewer shops. It was less of a city and more of a fishing village. Even the sand was different, being composed of large red grains instead of the fine white sand of Waikiki. Instead of a high rise hotel, we stayed in a cozy little condo-style room that had one of the best showers I’ve ever used.

With the car, we were able to go on more adventures. We visited the wharf, and caroused the shops there. I remember an art sale going on in a little park that was built around these gnarly trees that reminded me of a mangrove crossed with a weeping willow. We all bought ceramic ocarinas there from a guy who spent his weekends crafting them. While my sisters were enjoying a bathing suit blowout sale at a place called Hilo Hattie’s mom and I ducked into a music store where I bought my very first ukulele, a tuner, and a chord chart. The salesman helped me pick out the model and strings that I should use, and then we all piled into the car and returned to the hotel.

My ukulele was out of tune, and I had no hope of getting it in tune, since the pitch pipes I bought were of very little help to me at the time, being a first timer and all. So I carefully packed my uke away and was determined to get some help from my guitar playing father when I got home. Later that night we drove a few blocks to a country club to go see a luau. It was one of my favorite parts of the trip, and I remember being greeted by a man dressed in nothing more than a few banana leaves and shark teeth. Our emcee for the evening was a large Hawaiian woman who reminded me of Oprah, with her down-to-earth humor and her boisterous personality. She taught everyone a hula, told Hawaiian myths, and heckled the small band while we feasted on fruits, veggies, chicken and potatoes and of course roast pig. She encouraged us to try poi, and though it has the consistency and flavor of glue, it’s a remarkable palate cleanser. The night ended with the warrior man and his jester-like counter part Ka’pili (who’s mischievous grin and tendency to waggle his eye brows with every shake of his hip) performing an amazing fire dance.

We went back to our hotel but instead of going to sleep, we headed down to the hotel’s restaurant for a party – it was New Year’s Eve. There was a band playing, and my sister and I to this day will mimic the guitarist, because of his super-intense stare and jerky head bob that would make his 70s-style hair flop around his head, giving him the impression that his skull worked on several more vertebrae than a normal human being’s.

We had an early day the next day, since we were slated for a trip on submarine to explore the reefs near Maui. But, due to the festivities of the night before, the patrons of the hotel made it all but impossible to sleep. The weather was gloomy, and the tide was high and choppy, and the submarine company was canceling all tours for the day, which did nothing to improve our crabby moods. We were scheduled to fly back to Honolulu later that afternoon, so we checked out of our hotel and visited an aquarium, figuring it would be a nice consolation for missing out on the submarine. For an island surrounded by reefs teeming with all sorts of animals, the aquarium was extremely disappointing; it seemed like the aquarium at our zoo back home had more attractions than Maui’s.

After that, we headed back to the airport for our long trek home. We went from Maui, back to Honolulu, and from there, took a 6 hour flight into Dallas, which has to be the most enormous airport I’ve ever been in. We must have walked 3 miles traveling from concourse A to concourse double Q. After a quick bite, tired and haggard, we boarded the plane, and two hours later, made it home to Indianapolis.

The weather had been crummy, and we missed out on half of the activities we tried to go do. To many, it might have been a bad vacation. But I had gotten my ukulele and gotten to see the islands. I was content with my trip. I had gone to Hawaii.

Apologies for the delay in writing this post; but it’s my longest entry yet! My next post in this 50 States Series will probably take us to East Lansing. Michigan, which marks the beginnings of my travels with the Purdue football team. I intend to begin querying agents about the novel I wrote this week, so I may have posts pertaining to that as well. We’ll see how things go, but at any rate, I will try to be faster in posting here over the next few days.

During my senior year at Purdue, I was struck with an idea. I wanted to write a “bedtime story” that I could tell to my children when I had them. I wanted it to be a fun, light-hearted adventure that would appeal to a younger audience, and communicate it in a story that could be enjoyed by people of all ages. So I began fleshing out ideas: zany characters, intrepid heroes, plot points, action scenes, and so one, just letting my imagination run wild. In April of 2009, I wrote the first couple pages based on my ideas.

At the time, I was in the midst of finishing up my senior design project, and in the middle of a job hunt. As I wrapped up the year and moved back home, the book project got pushed to the back burner. I never forgot about it, but I felt guilty spending time writing it when I should have been spending time finding a job or securing freelance projects.

Around December, I had started a code project involving online writing and story-sharing, and it inspired me to look back into my story. I finished my first chapter, and had a lot of fun writing it. I was having a hard time finding work, but what if I could write and share my stories for a living?

I know that making money as a writer is about as easy as winning the lottery. That was the trouble with writing it in the first place: why dedicate so much time to something that will most likely not make me any money? But I had changed my mind. Why not? I loved doing it, and I wasn’t writing to sell it anyway. I was writing it for my personal enjoyment, and hopefully for the enjoyment of a youngster down the road. Publishing and selling it would be icing on the proverbial cake.

So, I was determined to finish it. I shared the chapter with my friend, and her response was, “Well…I need to read more!” which was a huge factor in encouraging me to write it. To know that another person wanted to read what I had to say made telling it all the more worthwhile. I started getting in the habit of taking notes and dedicating time to planning the story. I put time into figuring out what I wanted to say, and wrote down every passing idea I had to see what worked and what wouldn’t. I put more time into planning this story than I ever had for any other writing project – and I was enjoying it.

Of course, the student loans won’t pay themselves, so I was working at the same time as well, but before long, I was promising myself time each week to spend on the book. Thursday and Friday nights weren’t to be spent doing any programming (unless there was an emergency) and either writing notes or the story itself. I would continue to send each chapter as it was finished to my friend for her review, and she continued to encourage me to finish. After it was 3/4ths done, I started sneaking in more time to complete a chapter.

When I wrote those final words, I had her on the phone with me so she could “share the moment.” It was very humbling. I’d never done anything like this before. The story is 147 pages long (on 8.5×11 paper, single spaced) with over 88,000 words in 26 chapters. If we start when I finally finished and updated the first chapter, its been in production since February 11, 2010 and took just under 7 months to complete. I’m proud of it; even if no one else ever reads it outside my circle of family and friends and is an accomplishment more meaningful to me than either of my graduations.

I can safely recommend the Brother MFC-7340 Multi-Function Laser Printer, as it’s managed to print 4 very nice copies of the manuscript without a single problem (besides not having infinite toner). I will be giving copies to people I can trust and who I know will be interested in the story, so that the grueling editing process can begin. Hopefully within a couple months I’ll have a polished book that I can begin attempting to get published.

It’ll be wonderful if I can tell my stories (so far I have notes for 4 more) for a living. If not, it won’t be the end of the world – I’ll just keep writing for my own enjoyment, when I have the time. I’ll be sure to make posts as the process unfolds, and maybe once things get further along, I’ll share a sample of the work.

I’ll be going to New York in a couple days, but I may try to make a post about my Hawai’i trip before I fly out. Keep your eyes peeled!

My parents had just purchased a little drive-in restaurant called Mug ‘n Bun, and while it was a nice change of pace for them, it also made their work weeks insane. Throughout the warmer months, my parents would work crazy 18 hour days and my sister and I would only see them in the mornings before school and a few minutes before we went to bed at night. My aunt who lived next door or my older sister would babysit us when we weren’t at school until the frigid winter months, when the restaurant closed earlier and my parents could afford to sneak away from work to be home with us. Incidentally, our vacations couldn’t take place in the spring and summer, and we started taking winter vacations, which were cool with us (edit: pardon the pun) because we could escape the chilly Decembers of Indiana for the much warmer Florida winters.

Growing up, Dad and his family had gone to a place called Anna Maria Island on the Gulf Coast, and wanted to take us all back there. Another perk of my parents working so much meant that instead of driving, we would get to fly on an airplane instead. Our first trip to Florida was also my first ride on a jet liner, and while I was a little apprehensive, I was also told that flying was the safest way to travel in the world. And, I thought flight was just so cool that I wanted to know what it was like.

We were going to fly Southwest Airlines directly to Tampa, Florida, and I remember waiting in the old Indianapolis International Airport, staring at the ugly carpet and being bored out of my mind when our plane trundled up to the jetway. At the time, Southwest had all their planes painted in a yucky mustard-brown and orange style, and I wondered who in the world had made that decision. I came to the conclusion that they must have been that way because it would impossible to confuse their planes for clouds or sky on the horizon.

We taxied out on the runway after several hours’ delay (I’ve never left on time from Indiana in the winter), and I stared over my little sister out of the window into the pitch black night. I remember the dull growl of the jet engines rev up into a full-on roar as we were pressed back into the seats, and feeling the gentle bump as our wheels left the ground. Mom gave my sister and I pieces of gum to chew to help our ears pop after we had to deal with a different air-pressure. A flight attendant came by and offered my sister and I coloring books and plastic flight wings, because it was our first time on a plane. She also gave us tiny bags of honey-roasted peanuts to munch on, and tiny glasses of sprite. Air travel was pretty great back then; too bad it’s kind of lost its luster for me now!

We made it to Tampa somewhere around eleven PM, and my parents opted to just get a room for the night in Tampa, since we still had an hour’s drive ahead of us to get to the island. After a hasty sleep, we got up and went to the rental car place to get a maroon impala that would take us to our final destination. We cruised along the coastal high way, enjoying the fresh sea air and palm trees, thankful for sunshine and seventy degree weather. We made it to the little apartment-style hotel we had seen in the brochure, but it looked a little different. The building had been painted a hideous rose-pink, and the front office was actually a beat up trailer with plastic flamingo lawn ornaments out front. The owner was a portly man who constantly wore undershirts and hawaiian print tees open in front, but he was a nice guy.

Despite its questionable exterior, the hotel itself was pretty neat inside. It was like a townhouse, with a sitting area, balcony, kitchen and bathroom on one floor, and a spiral staircase leading up to another floor where our bedrooms would be. I remember I spent a lot of time at night in my room, reading the first book of the Harry Potter series by lamplight, and the bed that I had picked was so comfortable. We also spent a lot of time down by the pool, which was heated, and my sister and I pretty much had it all to ourselves since we were the only people staying in the building at the time. We would take these trips the first week of winter vacation, and stay for the week leading up to Christmas. I remember swimming one night during the Winter Solstice, and it was so bright outside, you could see your shadow by the moonlight.

The weather for our first trip down wasn’t the best, and I remember going out to the store with my parents, and an elderly man apologized to us because the weather was so cool. It was 68 degrees out, and we laughed and informed him that it was about 60 degrees warmer there than it was back home. He told us, “Yeah, I figured you were out of staters because you’re all wearing shorts.” We all shared a laugh and he wished us a pleasant stay in his home state.

It rained a lot, and Dad and I bought a cheap plastic chess board, and he taught me how to play when we were cooped up indoors, munching on a can of honey roasted peanuts and cashews. When we could, we would go to the beach and toss a football, and build sand castles, but they were never as grand as the ones we built in Myrtle Beach. I remember thinking the horseshoe crabs that wandered the beach were cool, and we tried to find a shell of one in the little surf shops to take home as a souvenir. Dad finally found a dead crab on the beach and removed the shell for me, and stuck it in a plastic container that was fated to be crushed on the flight home.

I remember driving a lot a few minutes to the south to nearby Bradenton and Sarasota where there decidedly more things to do. We went to a Bird Sanctuary and saw all kinds of exotic avians, but I remember most the raven who had learned to talk. We would be wandering throughout the sanctuary checking out the different birds, and you’d hear a voice a little like Elmo’s call out, “NO FAIR!” which was the bird’s favorite thing to say, according to her handler.

Across the way, there was an Alligator Sanctuary that was the home to several different species of alligators, crocodiles, and gavials. The star of the show was the American Alligator, one of Florida’s claims to fame, and three times a day, they would have a feeding demonstration, where a trainer would drop hunks of beef into the water, and you could see the gators rise out of the water about four feet to snatch the meat out of the air. We wandered the park for a while, and then it started pouring on us, but we had Dad’s huge golf umbrellas in tow. I remember stopping to look at one pen with Dad (the girls had gone to the bathroom) and we tried to find the gator. A flash of lightning revealed a thirty foot shadow lurking below a murky pond’s surface, in a scene that was eerily reminiscent of Jurassic Park. We left the park shortly thereafter.

We went to Florida twice during my junior high years, and aside from the two things I mentioned above, the trips were fairly low key. We hung out and relaxed on these vacations, instead of going out and doing things. It was always a nice escape, and we all got to spend time together on the beach or just watching movies.  It defined for me a new way to look at vacation as a restful affair instead of an active one. They were also the final trips my family would take before they split and divorced in 2001.

The divorce made it even harder for us to go on vacations, but mom still saved up a little bit each year, and by my senior year of high school, we had enough to go out on a trip to one place I had long wanted to visit: Hawai’i. Look for the next entry in a couple of days!

While I had certainly gone on road trips before, the trips out to South Carolina stick out especially in my mind for the grueling length of the drives. Accounting for breaks – and there were many thanks to the six of us kids – the drive would take around sixteen hours one way. However, I still have many fond memories of the time in the car. When we had gone to New York, I knew we went through the Appalachian mountains, but I have much more vivid memories of them from the South Carolina trips. The verdant hills of eastern Ohio grew higher and higher into ancient rounded peaks, twisting and winding through ridges that had been cleared decades before by dynamite. I remember the valleys of trees that would make my stomach twist as I looked down into them and thinking “what would happen if our car went down there?” I’d never ponder that answer for very long. I remember watching the sun come up while driving through the passes, the black sky turning gray, and being treated to soupy mist that became a torrential rainstorm. In retrospect, that would have scared me, but I was too young to understand the implications of driving in the rain on curvy roads. Mom and Dad would keep us safe.

And then there were the radios. My dad and uncle Charlie would use them to stay in touch and help each other navigate our way down, but during particularly long stretches of interstate, my sisters and I would radio my cousins in their truck. I remember Stacy the most as she would hail us using the callsign “Trailer Trash” and we would all laugh and laugh. I think my mom came up with a nickname for us, but I can’t remember it. And, like many two way radios, they worked on a couple generic bands, and we’d often pick up chatter from truckers or road crews and we would try to prank them. Once, we happened upon another group who was using radios for a similar purpose and had a polite conversation with them. They were such a novel idea, those radios, and it was one of the coolest things ever to me at the time. Nowadays, you’d just make a call or send a text message to stay in touch, and it makes me a little sad that generations that are growing up after me will never know the novelties of using a map and radios to road trip.

Anyway, other things I remember from the trip were driving through West Virginia and experiencing toll roads for the first time. The idea that you would have to pay to drive on a road was pretty stupid to me, because roads were for everyone to get from here to there. And they didn’t have highways in West Virginia: they had “turnpikes,” whatever those were. West Virginia was a weird place then, but I definitely owe it a proper visit. I remember the mountains dwindling down to foothills, and the land becoming flat as we made our way towards central North Carolina. We stayed the night there for a rest in a dinky little Motel 6 (note: I don’t count it on my list officially because it was just a “layover” stay), and it was only in the upper 50s when we left the next morning, and we hoped it wasn’t an indicator of the weather to come.

As we neared our destination, dad rolled down the windows so we could smell the salty sea air. Thousands of other travelers had the same idea as us, and the traffic was awful. It took us two hours to get from the outer limits of Myrtle Beach to our hotel, but we finally made it. While my dad and his sister checked in, we helped mom haul our suitcases up the stairs to the very top of the hotel, where we would be staying in the aforementioned penthouse. It was octagon shaped, with about six other units sharing the upper floor and soft blue astroturf covering all the walking areas. The hotel was U-shaped, with a huge pool in the center, and a long wooden staircase that lead directly into the ocean.

We hurriedly moved into our temporary home, with my little sister and I sharing a bed in my parents’ room, all of the teenage kids opting to sleep on the couches and on rafts in the “living room” of the penthouse. We threw on swimsuits and slathered ourselves in SPF50 and then dashed down the wooden stairs to the beach. The ocean was nothing new to me, but I still remember the sparkling blue water, the cry of gulls, and the fresh persistent breeze as it rolled off the water. But the thing I remember most? The shells.

Due to erosion of the beach, the Coast Guard had worked up a brilliant plan to vacuum sand from offshore back onto the beach to help fortify the coastline. They did a magnificent job, but at a cost. The beach became a veritable graveyard of shells, and if you forgot your sandals…well you just couldn’t afford to forget your sandals. My sister and I would like to stay in the fluffy white sand before the beach turned into shells, and I would toss a vortex football with my cousins down there.

There were tons of people in Myrtle Beach. I remember some guys a little older than my big sister riding on these pedal cars that you would lay in and steer with the back wheels. There were constant life guard patrols on the beach with their little dune buggies. It was rare for you to not see at least one volleyball game going on, and there were hundreds of body boarders out in the surf. Little single engine planes would race back and forth over the horizon trailing those clear banners with the red letters, hawking wares from the various surf shops that lined the streets of the main boulevard.

The shops were new and novel to me – you know the ones, with the swimsuits, sunscreen, goggles, witty t-shirts – and I would enjoy helping my dad pick out buckets to use for building sandcastles, or the coolest kite to get and fly on the beach. Each year we were there, there was always one item the stores would have trouble keeping in stock. The first time, it was hermit crabs, which we bought on the last day there because we had no luck finding a wild crab all week. The second time, it was laser pointers, that we all got and would have laser light shows when the parents weren’t paying attention.

We did so many things while in Myrtle Beach. Every day we would go to the beach and hang out on towels and jam to the local country station. By afternoon, we were probably splashing around in the pool, and sunset was usually met with a long walk on the beach. A couple times, we walked what seemed like two miles out to a pier, and had seafood dinners, and then would walk out to the very end of the wooden structure to watch the fishermen out there. As we watched, one of them caught a tiny shark, which must have been only a foot long. He tossed it back casually and told us how earlier in the day, he’d spotted a ten-foot tiger shark prowling around in the water. This did nothing to change my mind about the ocean, and I stuck to the surf. After dark, my dad and uncle would break out their guitars and sit on the balcony on cheap fold out lawn chairs and make up silly songs.

There were other adventures to be had as well. Dad had grown up being fascinated by kite flying, and took one of the kites we bought and unspooled the string as far as it would go. Then, he’d get out another spool and tie it on and string it out as well. Eventually, he had the kite on the end of eleven spools of string, a staggering thousand feet, prompting passersby to stop and squint way into the distance for the speck that was his kite. The wind finally broke the string, and the kite disappeared into clouds.

And then, there were the eponymous sand castles. As indicated by the previous paragraph, dad wasn’t one to skimp on anything he did. These weren’t just a couple buckets of sand stacked on one another; these were four-foot tall palaces. He and my uncle would get up around 6 in the morning, and begin digging a hole in the sand, just at the edge of the tide line. They used real lawn shovels for the job, not those cheap plastic shovels you’d get with a bucket and pile it all into an enormous mound that they would terrace. My cousin Terry was in charge of water, and hauled gallon buckets from the ocean to dump on the mound so it would hold its shape. The rest of us helped build the crenelated towers and walls using our plastic molds.

One of our mighty sand castles

I actually found a picture we took of the smallest sand castle we ever built. When we came down from our room the next day, we found this one stomped down by some heartless person, so we set out building another, bigger castle. This one we booby trapped with moats of the dagger-like shells, and the castle stood until the next day, but was dried out and was easily destroyed by the wind. We have a big picture of it somewhere, and if I can find it, I’ll try to scan it and update the post.

I have other memories of the worst sunburn of my life, and having to stay inside while everyone else was out at the beach having fun. Mom and I sat inside and chatted with the maid, who had the friendliest smile and wore a white bandana. We made peanut butter sandwiches and offered her one, but she politely declined before turning on her vacuum. Another night, my little sister was sleep walking and tried to leave out the front door of our room. It spooked my cousin, and she decided to sleep on the floor in front of the door, in case my sister decided to make another somnabulatory escape. It was scary then, but we all laugh about it now.

I remember a trip to the Pirate Lagoon Mini Golf course, that was probably the coolest I’ve ever seen. You started by riding some mine carts to the top of a volcano, where you would be sent to the Silver Run or the Gold Run and challenge Black Beard’s Par on each hole. I remember putting under a waterfall, and ramping over a stream to get to the pin, and putting to avoid a sneaky pirate skeleton from kicking your ball into a corner. It was definitely better than the Pro-style Greens minigolf course my dad and uncle liked.

It’s clear that I have so many fond memories of my trips to Myrtle Beach, and I’m sure there were millions of other things we did. It was definitely a great time, and maybe I should go back to see if the experience has aged well. Perhaps one day I will!

My next planned installment in this 50 States series will probably take us back to Florida, but I’m pondering skipping that story for now since I already talked about that State, and go on to talk about my first trip to Hawai’i. I suppose if there’s reader demand one way or the other, I’ll write what you would like to read!

We were staying in a Holiday Inn, but this wasn’t one of the typical-but-functional rooms you think of at chain hotels; we were staying at the Holidome. If you’ve never stayed in one, the rooms are built in a circular fashion and face an indoor pool/exercise area/arcade/picnic area.  Now, I’ve been around enough to know that many of these things are fairly common now, but to my young mind at the time this was the pinnacle of luxury (read: the coolest thing ever). We spent at least an hour of every day there at the heated pool, or in the very shallow kiddie pool. I remember I had lost a tooth at some point during the trip, and had a grand time pretending to be a whale, shooting water out of the gap in my front teeth.

I was all about whales this trip because the second day we were there, we drove over to Sea World of Ohio. And when we got there I saw something I totally wasn’t expecting: a giant statue of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. That summer, Sea World was putting on a Dinosaur Adventure exhibit, and if there was anything I loved more than dinosaurs when I was that age, I can’t remember it now. We went down the trail first thing, and I still have vivid memories of the things we saw: an Allosaurus emerging from the brush as if it were going to attack the unsuspecting animatronic stegasaur that wiggled its head and tail periodically; a replica of a brontosaurus rib cage that served as a tunnel; an adolescent protoceratops that you could saddle up and get a picture on; and of course, a pair of pteranodons suspended from metal cables as if they were swooping over the faux jungle.

It had been a rainy morning, but had stopped just before the park opened, lending this Dino Adventure an extra enchanting aspect: mist was rolling off the the trees and bushes, just like the pictures of the steamy Cretaceous jungles in all of my books. After our brief tour of the exhibit, I was ready to go back through, but my sisters wanted to go see the rest of the park. What did they think this was, Sea World? I wanted more dinosaurs! But I was outvoted a million to one (the parents always have more than one vote, you know) and we went to go visit the penguins.

They were Emperor penguins, and absolutely huge. At around 4 feet tall, they towered over me, but it was still fun watching them waddle around and swim with their careless grace. My little sister laughed with joy at the “pingins” as she called them, a term which is still used today whenever my family talks about the birds. We saw seals, walruses, and polar bears to finish out our tour of the Arctic world, and then jaunted over to the Deep Sea Aquarium to check out the sharks. After killing some time there, we had a date with Shamu.

The show was pretty familiar to me, since I had seen a dolphin show before, but it was still impressive because it was the first time I got to see an orca in action. The sheer power of the beast escaped me at the time, but thinking back, Shamu was a beautiful creature. Like many of the orcas in captivity, she had a curled fin, but she could jump so high out of the water. We kids wanted to site down in the “splash zone” and let Shamu soak us with her patented “Pectoral Fin Splash” but our parents weren’t too keen on the idea. However, after the show, they took us down to the tank so we could at least wave at the dolphins. After that, it was a stop by Shamu’s Shaved Ice and the gift shop where we all got a stuffed sea critter, and then we headed back to the Holidome.

As I mentioned before, one of our outings was a trip to the National Museum of the USAF. If dinosaurs were my favorite thing, fighter jets were a close second. I was a Top Gun junkie, and owned about a million MicroMachine jets. I used to cup my hands over my mouth and nose like a fighter pilot’s oxygen mask and zoom around the house shooting down bogies. Needless to say, I was once again in heaven.

There were so many cool things to see there, including a holographic “history of flight” kiosk movie, with models and wax dummies of the Wright Brothers, Amelia Earhart, and Charles Lindberg, with their respective aircraft. One of my favorite exhibits was an interactive hangar, where there was a retired Harrier jump-jet that you could sit in (there’s a picture of me in it somewhere…if I can find it, I’ll come back and insert it in the post). At the other end of the gigantic room, there was a real B-25 from the second World War that we got to walk through and see its wax dummy crew hard at work. On the far wall, a replica of a C-5′s cargo bay showed off the sheer size of the airship, with a tank sitting comfortably within. I remember the diameter of the jet’s wheels being longer than my father was tall.

There was another section dedicated to the space program, with replica models of just about everything. I crawled through a command module and played with the thousand switches on the consoles with some other kids. We zipped over to the lunar module and climbed the ladder to peek into the thing Neil and Buzz landed on the moon. On the way down, there was an astronaut dummy that made for another perfect photo op. After that, we made our way to the cafeteria to eat some hot dogs and french fries. It was located on the third floor of the building, and we sat near a window so we could watch some guys fly their stunt kites in some kind of competition. After we got done eating, we were going to go watch the kite fliers, but they were already done. But, it was time to go anyway, so we snapped a picture of all of us standing near an F-15 that marked the entrance to the museum, and piled into the car.

And then, just like that, the mega vacation was over. We headed back to Indianapolis the next day, as we only had a couple weeks to adjust to being home before school started again. It all happened almost 15 years ago, but some of my fondest childhood memories come from my time in New York and Ohio. I need to make sure I tell my parents that they rock for giving us such an awesome vacation. I was a pretty lucky kid.

I’ll try to post here again in the next few days about our trips to Myrtle Beach. South Carolina – provided something else doesn’t break up my State Adventure series. Thanks for reading!

I don’t remember much about the trip out, except that we got into Niagara Falls very late at night. It had taken us around 15 hours to get out there, and in those days, we didn’t have Mapquest or GPS; all we had to go by were TripTickets from Triple A. So, we got lost, and drove for at least an hour around town trying to find our hotel. We finally got there and checked in around 11:30 at night, and we were all starved. Mom and Dad settled us in the room, and then left to go find us some food while my big sister watched over us. They returned a few minutes later with a half dozen footlong hot dogs from a gas station just across the street. They came in little foil bags with “DELICIOUS HOT DOG”  printed on them in cheerful letters, and while they were the epitome of gas station hot dogs, they were the most delicious franks I’d ever had.

Our hotel was a standard two-bedder with a modest shower, but what it lacked in accouterments, it made up for with a sweet location. It was located just across from an unassuming  sandstone building with orange block letters proclaiming it to be the home of the Nabisco Co. Shredded Wheat Plant. A couple blocks away was the Native American Museum of Art, which was a neat building shaped like a totemic turtle statue. You had to cross a bridge and go down a circular metal staircase (something my young mind thought was so cool, for some reason) to get to get there.

But the main attraction, of course, were the falls themselves. They were only a couple more blocks away from the Native American Center. I remember following the trail for the first time, passing over the shallow rapids that crashed over a cliff forming the American Falls. The sound was incredible and the air was perpetually filled with mist that created little rainbows. But the American Falls were nothing compared to the sight that was just around the corner.

The Horseshoe Falls are an amazing sight, plummeting over a hundred feet into the Niagra basin. They are appropriately named, as the water that rushes from Canada into the basin has carved the cliff into a huge U-shape, forming one of the most iconic vistas in the country. We visited this site every day we were in Niagara Falls, with one of the more memorable trips coming after sunset, when they would project a rainbow of lights on the Horseshoe and shoot off fireworks. This same night, we followed the trail around and into Canada, marking my first and only trip outside of the United States. It was a short trip, as we only stopped in a gift shop, where mom and dad bought me a navy and blue boomerang that to this day sits above my window in my room.

Perhaps my favorite part about our trip to Niagara was my ride on the Maid of the Mist, or one of the iterations of the ship owned by the park. We were given blue ponchos as we boarded the vessel that were essentially sheets of cellophane with Niagara Falls printed on the chest. I rode with my father and sister on the upper deck of the boat, gripping the railing the entire time, except when I needed to wipe mist away from my glasses.  We chugged our way into the heart of the ghostly mist until it was all but impossible to hear each other talk over the thundering falls. And then, unceremoniously, we turned around and headed back to the dock so the Maid could exchange us for her next batch of passengers. The whole trip lasted maybe 15 minutes, but was still one of the coolest things that happened during our stay in Niagra.

We climbed the long stairway up the cliff back to my exasperated mother, who had been wrangling my little sister while we were on our ride, and walked over to the observation balcony to tell her about what it was like to go into the mist. We found a little section of railing that was missing that let us walk right down by the rapids that raced over the cliff. It was a lot like the ocean in the way that it made you feel small, that if you stepped out into that water, it would do whatever it wanted to you, and there wasn’t a swimmer in the world who could outrace that current. I remembered a legend a tour guide had told us about boy who fell into the water in a barrel and rode in it over the falls. I didn’t want to become a legend, so I timidly backed away from the edge of the water and waited on Dad to stop taking pictures.

It was evening time, so we followed the path back to the winding metal stairs that would take us back to the main walk that lead to our hotel. We were going to be leaving Niagara Falls the next morning, but we weren’t going home just yet; Mom and Dad had another plan in store for us. We were going to stay in Dayton, Ohio, for a few days and go see some of the sights there.

I’ll detail that leg of the trip in another post, hopefully within the next couple of days.

I remember my cousin and I decided we were going to try to stay awake until we got to Memphis, Tennessee. I forget why we chose that city now, but maybe it was because we were told it was the halfway point to our destination. No one else could stay awake that long, and I probably would’ve fallen asleep too if I hadn’t discovered an unlucky bit of information about myself: I have a really hard time sleeping in cars. I have to be prone, not in motion, and in relative silence to sleep, and driving affords none of these things. However, it was insanely early in the morning by the time the lights of Memphis started twinkling on the horizon (something like 4AM) and I simply couldn’t stay awake any longer…so I leaned on my older sister and….

I woke up maybe 6 hours later and we were near the edge of Alabama, very near the Florida panhandle. Everyone else was awake again, and there was some excitement because we passed a huge rocket sculpture  on the side of the highway. Being a huge nerd for “space stuff,” it’s no surprise that memory stuck. A few hours later, we pulled into the driveway of the house where we would be staying the week. Apparently it was my Uncle’s friend’s home, and they were away on a vacation of their own, and we were their house-sitters.

One of the first things we did was head out into the back yard through the sliding glass doors. The house was built on the water, so this was my first time looking at the ocean. I don’t really count it that much, because the house was built in a little cove, so the waves that rolled in were little more than over-sized ripples that didn’t even break as they lapped up on the sand. But that was okay with me, because it seemed safer: you see, the ocean was loaded with things like sharks and crabs and jellyfish, and as far as I was concerned it was dangerous enough without the huge waves. I waded out to my knees with some of those dorky swim shoes, but dared to take them off so I could wriggle my toes in the sand.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw a pelican. It flew directly over my head, silhouetted against the sun, and my heart skipped a beat because I thought I was seeing a live pteranodon. As much as I loved space things, I loved dinosaurs even more. The 8 year old in my mind is correcting me even now that pteranodons are not dinosaurs, but merely flying lizards. I remember the bird swooping down to land in the water, and the disappointment I felt when I noticed it had feathers instead of scales. There was also a great blue heron that wandered along the beach near the house, and we decided she must have had a nest around there. We’d often see her in the tall plants near the water, munching on a fish.

We kids would hang out at the house often, eating peanut butter sandwiches or playing Sonic the Hedgehog 2 while my uncle would go jet-skiing with his wife. Audra and I had these little plush elephants we had gotten in our Happy Meals and turned our vacation home into the mysterious would of EleLand, and we’d spread our elephant’s ears out (that meant they were flying) and zoom from the bunk beds to the dresser to the shower to the kitchen counter, having hundreds of silly adventures.

A couple times, though, Uncle Clint took us with him to the open ocean. I will never forget seeing the steely-blue ocean for the first time. It was nothing like the “ocean” back at the house. It went on forever and ever until it touched the sky. It made me feel small, and I was scared of it. I didn’t know what was out there, and the waves were too powerful for me. I kept to the edge of the surf, letting the water wash over my feet as I scoured the beach for shells, while my sister and cousin would rollick in the waves. My fears were confirmed when my cousin was stung by a jellyfish on the ankle, and I remember sitting with her on a towel while my aunt and uncle spread baking soda on the wound.

I would later step on a jellyfish as well, but thankfully I didn’t get stung. This unlucky cnidarian had washed up on the beach and was buried in the sand in such a way that only the squishy top of it stuck out. It had a weird sunburst pattern of violet-red and white, and at first I thought I had stepped on an old beach ball or someone’s missing swimsuit top (I still don’t know how my young mind jumped to that conclusion). I ran away from the jellyfish to the showers to wash the ick off my foot, and scared a flock of sea gulls out of the way. Until this point, I thought they were quirky, but interesting, birds. But as the flock scattered, one of them peed on me, and my perceptions of sea gulls soured considerably. I spent a lot of time in the shower after that, making sure I was no longer covered in sea gull pee and jellyfish juice. Looking back, it’s a wonder that I ever wanted to go back to the beach after that day.

I remember the day we left, my sister and I were on the very last level of Sonic, but my uncle turned the power off on us, because it was time to do laundry and pack up. Bummer. My uncle was frazzled because we were leaving a little later than expected, and he got stopped by a friendly Alabama trooper on the way home. Despite the fact that he was doing well over the speed limit, he didn’t get a ticket, but advised my uncle to stop and rest for the night to chill out.  We ended up going to a Holiday Inn or some similar type of hotel, as a result, which was cool with me because it meant that I would have an extra day of Spring Break.

We got up early the next day and went down to have a bowl of cereal for breakfast, then my uncle let us have a little bit of time to swim in the pool. It was all ours, and it was heated to boot. Audra and I had a ton of fun splashing around for an hour or two before we piled in the car and headed home. The trip back to Indy seemed shorter than the trip down, but we still didn’t end up getting home until around 10pm, then it was straight to bed. I’m sure there were other things that happened while we were down there that I don’t remember, but Florida was a lot of firsts for me. I’ve been back several more times, and will probably dedicate a few more posts to some of the other trips I’ve taken there.

My next planned post will be about my first trip to New York and the first time I left the country. Stay tuned!