RV there yet? (an incredibly long, and more than likely incredibly boring, post about my exploits from last weekend)

This weekend was RV Trip 2006. For those of you who don’t know our friend Jake went to The Pennsylvania State University so every year he likes to organize a trip up to State College, PA to enjoy a weekend of football, food, and friends. And booze, lots of booze. In fact I would say that is the most important factor for many on the trip but it didn’t work well with my alliteration. Penn State has an excellent tailgating tradition; they are ranked very highly by people who create polls that rank things like top tailgating schools. I’m sure Jake knows the exact numbers on this but I just don’t care enough to look them up for this blog. Since it’s and entire weekend affair most people, ourselves included, rent recreational vehicles for the trip. It’s actual a very odd and somewhat surreal scene, hundreds of RVs parked in a field outside a football stadium. It’s like someone’s white trash, campground nightmare, only awesomer. Here is a brief and completely inaccurate timeline of the trip (and I’ll probably lose the timeline format very early on because things get a little hazy after a while):

Friday:

11:40 - Mike, Brian, and myself ride up together. The plan was to meet at The Historic Round Barn Farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania at 11. Naturally we were late, and naturally we are the first ones there, with the exception of Jake and Iceguy, but that is only because they were picking up the RV’s. Although it sounds like we were making a tourist stop on the way to the game we weren’t. Jake’s family actually lives on The Round Barn Farm. We did take some time to pick some apples and eat them, check out the petting zoo, and walk around the round barn. It’s very round. Also there was a field trip of elementary school kids there that day. It was pointed out to me that as I was snapping that picture of a group of 7 year old that I probably looked pretty creepy but I needed to document the fact that people actually take field trips to Jakes house.

12:30ish – Stopped at Sheetz to pick up some final supplies and grab something to eat (the final supplies consisting of about 20 more Red Bulls and some batteries). This is where this conversation occurred:

Brent: You guys start drinking yet? (referring to the group in the other RV)
Mike: Yeah. You?
Brent: I cracked one open before we left the Round Barn.

For the record that’s when I this was going to be good.

After this we got stuck in traffic, there was an accident and we weren’t moving. Some crazy girl then started bothering us to use our mobile bathroom. We said no because you just can’t take the risk that this girl may poop in the bathroom effectively ruining the weekend (Rule No. 1 of RVs: No deuce in the toilet). Anyway she kept wondering around for some reason, this is a picture of her falling of the traffic barrier.

2:00 or so – Arrive at Penn State, park RVs, set up tents, start playing Baggo. Baggo is without a doubt the greatest tailgating/beach/bbq game ever and me and Brian have come together to form an almost unstoppable team that I like to talk a lot of trash about which will later come back to haunt me.

The next few hours: Just a lot of drinking and Baggo. Highlighted by Iceguy playing the all 80’s playlist from his Ipod on the boombox while frantically pounding beer and Red Bull in order to make up for lost drinking time while driving (which later results in a whole lot of him talking way louder than everyone else and yelling at us about how awesome the music is).

7:00 – Eat the delicious Kabobs Jake prepared for dinner that night. This is only noteworthy because everyone was starving at this point, so much so that Brent tried to eat and uncooked Kabob and gnawed on a piece of raw chicken for a good 15-20 seconds before I informed him that it wasn’t cooked he it was probably a bad idea.

9:30 – The beer pong tournament is winding down, I believe Leanne and Dave won, so I try to sneak off to bed because 10 hours of drinking has wiped me out. Some people catch wind of this and I get taunted mercilessly in the form of a chant calling me a pussy so I get up and join the flip cup tournament.

11:30 – Don’t Stop Believin’ by Journey (the greatest band ever) comes on Iceguy’s 80’s mix. I think the consensus among the group is the most of the other tailgater’s have stop believin’ so the 10 of us choose to sing the entire song to remind them not to stop. Jake is in the bathroom at the point (aka the row of Port O’ Potties a couple hundred feet away). When he comes back he say, “not only are you guys by far the loudest ones here, I think we’re the only ones awake.” Awesome, still got it.

Soon after this is bedtime. A word of advice, when packing for a trip up in the mountains, in the fall, remember a blanket, they’re not standard in RVs. In doing so you can avoid the worst night of sleep of your life. Needless to say it was cold.

Saturday:

8:00 – Wake up way to early because it’s to cold and uncomfortable not to be awake. Toast a bagel (and by toasting I mean grilling, sounds strange but is surprisingly effective), start playing Baggo again. This is when the dominance of Brian and Eric comes to and end. Jake is playing out of his mind, scoring on nearly every toss, sinking all 4 shots in the hole (which by rule means the opponents have to shotgun a beer), he even made one with his eyes closed. It was the game of his life, out of nowhere he turned into Michael Jordan in the ’92 Finals against the Trailblazers, it was incredible.

9:30 – 2:00 – Drinking games and lunch. It’s been a really long time since I was drunk by mid morning. I miss college.

Another word of advice: two things that don’t mix, chugging beer and eating several hot dogs and cheeseburgers. This scenario played out beautifully after Aaron ate lunch then promptly lost two straight games of 99, having to chug 3 beers in a span of about 4 minutes (All mostly because Dave was purposely losing so that Aaron would have to chug more, I think he wanted to see him throw up). I don’t think the results turned out very pretty.

3:00 – Time to go to the game, Penn State vs. Northwestern, I couldn’t be more excited! Or the exact opposite, mostly because it was raining and who wants to go watch a blowout with to teams you don’t care about when you don’t really love college football. I don’t so me, Brian, and Mike sold our tickets and stayed back while everyone else went to the game. I think some people were jealous.

6:30 – Everyone came back from the game for more eating and drinking. It’s always an interesting day when you can get drunk, stop drinking long enough to sober up, and then still have enough time in the day to get drunk again. Once again, I miss college. The rest of the night trailed off into a bit of boredom. So much so that Aaron set his poncho on fire, no one really found this entertaining but Aaron, and he was absolutely mesmerized.

Then the clear highlight of the trip happened; a level of immaturity rarely reached by a group of 25-27 old adults. That’s right; Brian lit one of Mike’s farts on fire. I was always under the impression that this was an urban myth, that it couldn’t actually be done, but I was wrong. It apparently produces a puff of blue flame, and singes the butt cheeks (which Brent found particularly hilarious). The worst part of this is that I wasn’t there to see it; only three people witnessed this miraculous feat. This may go down as one of the biggest regrets of my life. But apparently it was funny; I’ve never seen 3 people laugh this hard, so much so that I couldn’t control my laughter. I thought I might throw up from laughing so hard at other people laughing at something I didn’t even see. We spent the rest of the night trying to recreate this magic. One time Mike went to off to the bathroom only to come sprinting out of nowhere yelling, “Get ready, I’m not kidding” and pulling his pants down only to blow out the flame with his flatulence.

Sunday:

6:30 – The carbon monoxide detector went of in our RV. I was willing to ignore it and go back to sleep, because I was exhausted, until Mike (who is a few months away from his PhD in chemistry and has, I’m pretty sure, been poisoned more than once by noxious fumes) informed me that one of the symptoms of CO poisoning in feeling tired. So we all woke up, cleaned up, and shoved off way early than everyone else thus beating the RV traffic.

All in all another successful trip, I consumed enough calories to feed a small village, drank 30-40 beers, and had an overall good time. We should do this again next year.


NOTE: They call Penn State Happy Valley. I don’t know if this is in reference to the valley it’s nestled into in the mountains or what but it’s a misnomer. I’ve been there a grand total of 6 days in my life and it has rained 5 of them. Happy Valley will henceforth be referred to as Sad Valley by me.