Ah, Orlando. That is where the ministry I once worked for relocated to. I've been there once, way back in...um...199-something. Maybe 92 or 91. I think it was before I graduated from high school. My one and only time ever going to DisneyWorld. We were only there for one day so only did one park.

I remember my senior trip. It wasn't a week long, but it was fun. We packed a lot of activities into four days. Gack! I feel an adventures with post attack coming on!

Day (night?) Zero: The Long Long Bus Ride

Everyone who went on the trip met in the high school parking lot...11:00 PM. The charter bus was schedueld to pull out at midnight. It seemed like an unusual, and therefore adventuresome, time to start a cross-country trip, so there was a sense of excitement in the air. We loaded all our luggage under the bus, boarded, and left on time. I don't think we left anybody behind.

It was an approximately 8-10 hour trip to our first stop, Asheville, North Carolina. I think I got some sleep on the way, because I don't recall being incredibly tired the next morning when we finally got there. The horrible in-drive movie selection probably helped in that regard (getting sleep). The guy who volunteered to bring movies for the trip was a popular, but very eccentric person, who at the time was into the "retro" scene, well before it became widely popular. I don't remember all the movies he brought, but the musical "Grease" was one of them, and another was "The Karen Carpenter Story." Oh why, why?

Day One: Wherein We Saw How The Rich Once Lived and Got Settled Into Our Accomodations

We arrived in Asheville sometime around 8 or 9 AM, and went straight to the local tourist trap, the Biltmore Mansion. Even if you've never been there, you may have seen this place; it was the location used for the shooting of the movie "Richie Rich" with good ol' MacCauley Culkin. (This trip took place in '93, a year or two or three before Richie Rich was filmed.)

The Biltmore Estate is *huge*, inside and out. We went on the guided tour that is typical of such places, where you follow a talkative guide through the entire place, always behind a nice soft plush velvety rope attached to poles at either end so that you can look but not touch. I think some of the rooms were even walled off behind plexiglass. Everything looked old and expensive.

The "back porch" of the place overlooks a long, green lawn ending in a stand of trees which sort of go into a long vista of rolling hills. Off in the distance is a breathtaking view of the Appalachians. I took several pictures here, none of which turned out well at all, as it was a rather overcast day.

All of the landscaping in the front looked normal, as none of it had been cut into huge dollar sign shapes for the stupid movie that would one day be filmed there.

Biltmore also had a pretty neat gift shop, but I didn't buy anything.

One thing I remember is that it was very humid, and the knuckles in my thumbs got really stiff. That happens to me sometimes, and I hate it.

After Biltmore, we went into Asheville for lunch. The bus parked in a central location, and we could walk to any of the nearby eateries to, well, eat. I chose Subway. Following lunch, we all packed back into the bus (come to think of it, there were *two* busses, but I always rode on the same one) and continued on to our "base of operations" for this trip, a Christian campground called Camp Awanita in the Awanita Valley of North Carolina. I have no idea where this place is on a map. The rest of this day consisted of getting settled in to our cabins and checking out the place.

It was a large, spacious facility nestled in the Awanita Valley. It had a smallish lake for swimming, boating, and zip-lining (an activity which I had, and still have, no stomach for). It also had two steep, bumpy, muddy trails that went up the side of a smallish mountain, a foothill, really. We later went for jeep rides up and down these trails. At the top was another excellent view of the Appalachians.

Day Two: White-Water Rafting!

On day three, we went white-water rafting on the Chatooga River. The Chatooga River is the border between South Carolina and Georgia, so as we were traveling down the river, we had one state on our right and another on our left, which was kind of weird and cool. White-water rafting was fun and scary all at the same time. It was an all-day activity. We only had one minor injury, a girl who got dumped on one of the rapids and got banged up a little on the rocks. But, she wasn't seriously hurt.

White-water rafting was fun. I took one of those little waterproof fun-saver cameras with me and got some halfway decent pics. At one point I lost the camera over the side of the raft, but got it back somehow; one of the rafts behind us may have retrieved it for us.

Everyone pretty much collapsed at the end of day two.

Day Three: Camp Day

On day three, we spent the whole day at the camp, swimming, boating, zip-lining (not me) and taking AWESOME TURBULENT GRAVITY THRILL RIDES in a Jeep up and down the muddy bumpy trails on the side of the mountain! I got to go twice, I think, and would've done it more if demand hadn't exceeded supply. That was probably even more dangerous than white-water rafting, but it RULED.

A group of the "popular but weird people" tried to play a prank on a couple who were dating by "kidnapping" the girl while disracting her boyfriend and then trying to make him think she had "disappeared," but it didn't work. He saw through their little scheme. That was DUMB.

Some of the more daring guys had someone take a picture of them wearing just t-shirts and underwear, and somehow that picture made it into our yearbook. That was DUMB.

I also learned how to play "Wild UNO" and "Crazy UNO" for the first time on day three. That RULED. In Wild UNO, if someone plays one of the "bad cards" like a Draw Two, Skip, or Draw Four on you, and you have one also, you can play your on top of theirs. Then the person after you gets the penatly, only it's cumulative. Of course if *they* also have the card, they can play it, and...you get the idea. In CRAZY UNO, it works the same way, only you can play OUT OF TURN whenever a "bad card" is played. Basically, the minute one of those cards is played, anyone and everyone who has one can slam them down, out of turn, and whoever is after the last person to play gets the penalty. Wild and Crazy UNO RULE.

Day Four: The Voyage Home

Early in the morning on Day Four, we loaded up out bus again and prepared to make the trip back home to Ohio. However, we did have one last stop planned for that afternoon on the way.

GATLINBURG, Tennessee! What a place! This was my first visit there ever. The second time was last October, and I posted about it shortly afterwards. We only had about four hours to check it out, so naturally we didn't see everything.

We milled around downtown Gatlinburg for a while wandering in and out of all the different gift and novelty shops. Some people went up the side of the mountain on the lifts; others had "period" photos taken of themselves and their friends in "authentic western garb." I remember seeing lots of things that I would have enjoyed doing, but either didn't have the time or the money.

After a while, a bunch of us hopped on the shuttle bus to Pigeon Forge. The girls wanted to go shopping at the outlet malls, and the guys wanted to look for video arcades or go bungee jumping. I went for the former, rather than the latter...I guess I'm just not adventuresome enough. I remember playing "Mortal Kombat" for the first time in one of the arcades. I got hooked on it and spent way too much money playing those games over the next few years until I finally lost interest after "MK3" came out. But that's another story.

Soon our time was up, and we reboarded our busses and completed an uneventful trip back home. Just a few short weeks later, we all donned our caps and gowns and graduated. But that's another story.

Gri"anyone else have a good senior trip story to tell? I'm sure Kiki will when she returns"shny