Spring Break  

Spring Break! The highlight of a long second semester. And for some, the highlight of the year. Spring Break also symbolically starts the countdown to the last day of school. Just a few weeks left!  

For this year’s break, four of my longtime friends and I drove down to Panama City Beach, Florida. Steven, Cameron, Nick, Justin, and I met at Transylvania University in the fall of 2019. Every year, Transylvania had the incoming freshmen move into the dorms two weeks before classes start so we can get accustomed to the campus and figure out which of our classes were in what buildings. All five of us met during those two weeks, and we have stuck with each other since then. We’ve done literally everything together these past four years and there is no other way to end it than with a road trip to the Panama City for spring break.  

We stayed at the Grand Panama Resort for six nights. This trip was mainly a “bittersweet” trip for the fact that we are going to literally go our separate ways in a couple of months. Everybody in this friend group is leaving this region of the country, and I’ll be the last one to do so when I graduate in May 2024. Steven is going to law school in Alabama, Cameron is moving to Philadelphia for graduate research, and Justin is moving to Charlotte, North Carolina to work for Bank of America, and Nick is going to Parris Island for Marine Corps Boot Camp. As for me, I am moving to San Antonio, Texas as soon as I finish my degree here at IUS.  

We made it a point to soak up every second of this trip and to have a good time. We went to the beach every day and spent the majority of those days at the beach just walking along the coastline. Every day for lunch or dinner, we would always walk along the coastline and find a beachside restaurant where we wanted to eat. We walked pretty much everywhere while we were in Panama City. The weather was absolutely phenomenal our entire time there. Every day it was sunny, and temperatures were in the 60s and 70s — unlike southern Indiana. 

Like so many others on the beach, we all brought a football, baseball and gloves, and spike ball. If we were not walking on the beach, we would throw a ball around to one another. Since all five of us are super-competitive, we would run routes in football because we did not have enough people to play an actual game of football. We would throw the baseball around and see who could throw it the farthest. And spike ball, since it’s an actual game, we didn’t have to use our imagination to keep ourselves entertained.  

We always ended our nights in one of the three hot tubs that were at the resort. We would just chill in the hot tub, listen to music, and just talk with each other. We were very fortunate that every night, except our last night, we got to enjoy the hot tub all by ourselves.   

I’ll remember this Spring Break for the rest of my life. There is nothing like spending time with your friends on the beach. Euphoric.