The first time I was in college, in 1983, several girls on the floor in my dorm participated in a chartered-bus trip, and they were a couple days late getting back because the bus broke down somewhere in the Deep South, and the bus driver had to fly to another city to pick up the correct part. Never forgot about that part.
A decade later, my sister talked about doing a “Spring Break”, but our parents told her that if she wanted to do that, she would have to pay for it herself. She didn’t want to do it that badly.
I had no money. I remember one year my parents picked me up from my school and we drove south till we hit really south Florida, where my sister lived.
So much of what I see on TV about college doesn’t match my experience at all. I didn’t have a car. I wasn’t out partying nightly. No time, no money. A lot of studying was involved, not much hijinx or witty/playful banter. I enjoyed it and would love like to do it again but the college folks on TV are much too well adjusted…I think.
I graduated In '73 and don’t remember anyone ever doing anything special during spring break. Was it even a thing then? Personally, I’d either hang around the school or go home and work for a week.
I was in college from '83-‘87. For spring break, I just went home for the week, except for my senior year, when my girlfriend and I went together to her parents’ house in Minnesota for the week.
I knew a few people who went to Florida or Texas for the break, and I had some friends who did a road trip to D.C. (one of them was from suburban D.C), but as I remember it, big bacchanal trips for spring break were something that people talked about wanting to do, much more than they actually did it.
Freshman year (1982-83) I was up at LaCrosse; they had a bus that went down to Texas stuffed with students. We watched them leave as we waited for parental units and felt very sorry for the bus driver - the drinking age was 18 then.
The other spring breaks I was back home and going to to the UW and worked through spring break.
I have to say, I’m a little disappointed-- I came into this thread hoping for wild tales of epic bacchanalia
My college experience during 82-87 was similar to a lot of you-- I was fairly poor and worked my way through college-- toward the end working full time while holding down a full course load. It wasn’t all work and no play- I found some time for college parties (don’t think I slept much in those days) but there was never any time or extra money for a spring break trip.
Later on in my later 20s, early 30s my sister and her husband had moved to South Florida, so I used to fly down to visit every year, often in March, and some of the areas we’d hang out at had spring breakers. But by that age they were annoyances-- ‘Christ, an invasion of spring breakers’. even if I had wanted to try to join in I was at the age where they’d call me ‘sir’, as in ‘sir, can we help you? Are you lost?’
Ha! I was in college from '82-'86, and went one year with some friends on a road trip to D.C. where we visited a buddy who was living there at the time. We were utter wild men. We spent the week touring anything that was free - government buildings, national monuments, the Smithsonian, Arlington, civil war sites, etc. We drove over to Baltimore and Ocean City one day, which was the first time I saw the Atlantic Ocean. My other spring breaks were stay-at-home non-events.
My usual cash flow pattern in college was to work all summer and save money, and then spend it during the school year, and supplement with whatever job I had during the school year (last 2.5 years).
So by the time April rolled around, I was fairly tapped out- I had enough to sustain “normal” college spending, but I didn’t have a lump of cash laying around to travel somewhere and engage in the stereotypical spring break stuff.
Beyond that, none of my friends did that sort of thing anyway. Some did do special stuff, but it wasn’t Padre, Ft. Lauderdale, etc… It was stuff like going camping or other stuff that wasn’t beach-related.
So in general, I’d just go home, chill and catch up with high school friends who were in town at the same time. ISTR that one year I went back to my summer job employer and did some one-off work for them (installed shelves in their file room) as my primary activity.
First two years, I got a ride to my hometown and hung out in my parent’s basement.
Junior year, I and a some friends drove overnight from Chicago to somewhere in Central Florida and stayed for a week. It wasn’t the bacchanalia that one would expect. We were rather nerdy. We spent a lot of time sitting around a dingy hotel pool. But we also went to the Kennedy space center. As I said, rather nerdy.
Senior year, we drove to southern Illinois to hang out with some friends at SIU and did some hiking. That was actually the most fun.
