A Stop at Friendly’s Was the Best Part.
When Shane was a freshman in high school, I suggested that we spend spring break touring colleges with his friend from kindergarten and her mom. The plan was to traverse the great state of Connecticut and get a feel for what both kids liked – and didn’t – about colleges.
It was Shane’s first official college road trip. I called it the Connecticut “Rhode” Trip because our goal was to make it as far east as the Rhode Island School of Design, which has a fabulous film program. I thought I was so clever with “Rhode” trip. When we arrived, we discovered that the school’s proximity to Brown – literal walking distance – was its best feature. Shane learned that he isn’t much of a city person, and Providence is most definitely a city. Plus the “conservatory” feel of the college wasn’t his thing.
We started our trip driving through New Jersey, so Shane’s first college visit was actually at Princeton University. This was a thrill for me because the campus was incredible. We wandered into the children’s section of Princeton’s library with its special nooks and cozy chairs. We stopped at the bookstore in the darling town of Princeton where I wanted every Tiger shirt I saw, but Shane was not impressed. In fact, he didn’t like Princeton at all.
What I remember most from Princeton is that Shane wouldn’t cross the street unless he was in a crosswalk. This happened long before we realized the extent of his rule-following behaviors.
Our “Rhode” trip included Princeton, Rutgers, Fairfield, Yale, Brown, Johnson & Wales, University of Connecticut, Wesleyan, and Quinnipiac. University of Connecticut was too big for his liking, although again – I liked it. I still think about returning just for those delicious sweet potato fries we got for dinner.
I tried to make the trip fun, since it was still spring break. Our itinerary included stops at a soda bottling factory, the world’s largest Pez dispenser (and its store) and a comic and cartoon museum that turned out to be much more fun for the moms than for the kids. I also insisted on going to a hotel with a water slide, which was a disaster because the pool was overrun with unruly children. To be honest, a stop at Friendly’s was the best part of our trip.
We missed Connecticut College – which was probably the best fit for Shane and his friend – because we rushed off in search of an abandoned amusement park. I thought we might find something really interesting, since Shane loves amusement parks, but it was awful. The sun was setting as we arrived, so we raced to where it was supposed to be, threw our car into park, and wildly went in search of roller coaster pieces. We walked about a mile before finding a dwarf-sized, graffiti-covered shack deep in the woods. We took pictures and hiked to the car in darkness. (Years later, because I was so sorry about this experience, we returned to Connecticut College for a tour.)
What I learned on our “Rhode” trip is that Shane likes small colleges with wide open green spaces. He doesn’t enjoy large campuses or urban environments. The biggest success for Shane was the discovery of Fairfield University, where dogs visit campus every Wednesday – and we happened to be visiting on a Wednesday. There’s nothing like petting Yale’s bulldog to evoke a longing for Fairfield.
So … we learned, and it was a good base for the next three years of visits.