Why I Appreciate My Own Two Feet

My tours to The Windy City and Beantown were...memorable, to say the least. I think the amount of stress that I dealt with during the last week and a half has probably taken ten years off my life. Travelling and hitting snags along the way when you're on your own or with friends isn't a huge problem and it can actually lead to some fun adventures, but hitting snags when you've got a coach bus full of students and teachers is a whole other story.

En route to Chicago, we hit major traffic problems just a few hours into the trip that sent us driving through farmland in Plattsville detouring around a major accident. That set us back by at least an hour and a half. Then the coach broke down. Twice. The first time, we walked the students to a nearby service center by the highway where we spent an hour and a half waiting for our home on wheels to be repaired by a mechanic who clearly didn't have the right tools because somewhere near Lansing, Michigan, the damn bus broke down again and we spent FOUR HOURS at a McDonalds waiting for a mechanic and subsequently a new coach to arrive. We were delayed by over six hours and didn't arrive in the city until about 1:00am when we were supposed to check into the hotel at 6:30pm.

The kids were positively awesome and had awesomely keen attitudes about the whole thing. It was a band trip, so when we were waiting in Michigan for the mechanic they pulled out their instruments and we jammed in the parking lot to the tune of our own creation, 'Broken Bus'. Yours truly came up with the melody line to that, despite my lack of formal musical education in the last five years, thankyouverymuch.

The rest of the trip was characterized by angry teachers who promised to make a stink when they got home re: broken down bus x2, drivers who didn't know Chicago, who didn't respect me or my position, who ignored my questions, were rude to me and the teachers and who I want fired from their company ASAP.

Highlights include students who were so cool and cute that I wanted to pick them up and squeeze them until they went "Squee" and then pop them into my pocket so I could carry them around for all time, an awesome music teacher, vocal harmonies that gave me goosebumps, the Art Insitute where I could spend days upon days, and these bits of Chicago:

The Adler Planetarium and it's gorgeous view of the skyline; Andy's Jazz Club.
 

A Cubs game at Wrigley Field! I couldn't believe how crazy Chicagonians are about their baseball.
 

The Cloud Gate in Millennium Park.
 

Frank Gehry architecture. *orgasm*
 

The Chicago River and Harbour boat tour.
 

***

The trip to Boston was similar, but replace a broken bus with The Big Dig and a driver who doesn't know where he's going with a driver who doesn't know where he's going but acts like he does. In the process, he gets us lost en route to Harvard for an hour thus resulting in the cancellation of our campus tour and then takes another hour to find an on-ramp to the I-93. In trying to find the highway, we got onto Storrow Drive and unknowingly drove up to a 10' high foot bridge that spans across the road. The coach is 12'4". Suffice to say, we couldn't keep driving because we'd lop off the top of the bus, so we sedated the kids with Pirates of the Caribbean and I promptly called 911 who showed up a half hour later to stop traffic so we could back our asses off the road, while I slinked further down in my seat wanting to die from sheer embarassment. Once we finally got onto the 93, we were stuck in traffic for two hours due to a really bad accident. The group ended up spending nearly the entire second day on the bus and even missed appointments at the Institute of Contemporary Art AND the observatory at the Prudential Building. Good times!

I think my blood pressure shot up a gazillion points every time I set foot onto that coach. After a while, my driver stopped doing his job so I had to be his eyes and his brain and tell him how to get everywhere which annoyed me to no end but I couldn't do anything about it because the last thing I wanted was to get lost AGAIN and have the group think I was more incompetent than they already did. You know, there's a reason why they call Boston America's Walking City - YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO WALK IN IT, NOT DRIVE. Dear Everyone, for your own health, safety and mental well-being, please be on foot if you ever decide to visit Boston, which I think you should because it really is beautiful when it's not rainy and when you don't spend half the time in a car with a map trying to figure out where the hell you are and how the hell to get OVER THERE.

The hotel also assigned students to rooms that were either already occupied by other clients or had just been used. 'Used' in this case means that it was clear a couple went into the room, munched on some snackies which they littered onto the carpet, had sex and left the condom wrapper on the floor, showered and threw their towels everywhere and then checked out. Said hotel also gave a room to the teachers that had just one bed in it and didn't have a pay phone.

Dinner on the first night at The Hard Rock Cafe was a bust as we were supposed to be in at 7pm and out at 8pm. At 8, fourteen kids didn't have food yet because the manager insisted on making everything fresh. That's great, in theory, but not when you have 100+ people to serve in an hour flat. Then, finally understanding our time constraint, they started bringing out burgers that weren't fully cooked. One of my boys threw up nine times that night.

The tours sound worse than they really were. The students were awesome and other than the benefit of paid travel, it's the kids that keep me loving this job, as stressful as it can be at times. There's nothing like chatting one on one with the class trouble-maker and having him come up to me at the front of the crowd wanting to talk to ME about what he did during free time. I love it when the girls say HI to me enthusiastically and we show and tell about our shopping purchases. And I can't explain how awesome it is when the students start wanting to take pictures with me and ask that I come to the back of the bus more often to hang out with them.

Highlights: A group of rowdy Grade Ten boys who played The Penis Game (whoever yells the word PENIS the loudest wins), really chill teachers, visiting Salem even though the Witch Museum sucked, Shear Madness, gorgeous weather on the last day and tanning at the Quincy Market while watching a jazz band perform at Fanueil Hall.

The weather on the first day vs the last day:
 

The Public Garden
 
8:34 pm