Going To See The Ocean

The first college that I attended had a pretty good sports program, as far as religious schools go. I was a member of the baseball team. We were NCAA division II. Since we live in an age of participation trophies and feelings that must not be hurt, I’m not going to say that we weren’t very good. I will, however, say that we were imbalanced in the win/loss department. By the way, I do have a killer participation certificate. Yes, a participation certificate,,,,,,,, from an institution of higher learning. They handed them out right after we finished our orange wedges and Capri Suns. On the bright side, it is actually worth as much as some bachelor’s degrees.

Baseball is a spring sport, so in college, that meant that you had to spend spring break at the school, while everyone else went home or to the beach. Me and the other guys from the team were stuck in a nearly empty dorm for a week. We had several games scheduled, but the rest of our time was unaccounted for. During one two day gap, me, my roommate who was our catcher, and our buddy, the second baseman, decided that we were bored enough to use the limited funds that we had on a short road trip. My roommate was from California and had never seen the Atlantic Ocean. Okay, we could check that off of his list fairly easily.   From the school, it was about two and a half hours to Rehoboth Beach in Delaware. It was a late afternoon in March. We threw some blankets and sleeping bags into my 1988 Honda Accord, and we were out. The road trip is a time-honored tradition. I don’t know how people live without cars and the freedom that they provide. The ride to Rehoboth was uneventful. Rural Delaware is lonely. We arrived after dark, and since it was still cold and none of the boardwalk shops had even thought about opening, parking was not a problem. The three of us got out of the car, and with some excitement, walked up onto the boardwalk for a view of the beach and dark expanse of ocean. It was choppy and windy and couldn’t have been more unimpressive. We stood there for maybe three minutes. Then my roommate said something like, “That’s it huh”. And,,, we left.

It was fairly late in the evening and I was too tired to drive back. Besides, we had kind of planned on spending the night somewhere. I drove all around town looking for an out of the way place to park and sleep. Finally we settled on a quiet residential street. We all stretched out as much as you can stretch in an Accord. I might have mentioned that it was cold out. It only took twenty minutes or so for the windows of that car to steam up like two people were having quite a rendezvous inside. I slept fitfully, worried that at any minute a police officer was going to knock on the window and say, “Hey what’s going on in there?” I would have to respond with something like, “It’s just us three dudes, officer, sir.” Luckily, no one bothered us. The next morning we headed back to school, sore from sleeping in contorted positions.

I know you may be like, “you guys didn’t even have enough money for a Motel 6 or something”. Look, we were all very thrifty (cheap).  And no good story ever ended with, “And then we checked into the Motel 6 and got a good nights sleep.”