My Best Summer Vacation

My favorite summer vacation, now that a big question to ask, at 45 I have seen plenty of them and each one has their own specialness about them. If I were to have to pick just one summer vacation that stands out, it would have to be when I was 17 years old and I was going to college the following year. I had felt that this was the last "mega fun" summer, with a major case of really hard schoolwork in my future, this was to be my let it all hang out time. My best friend Richie and I planned a concert every weekend and a big camping trip in the middle, we both had summer jobs that made us some serious money (remember in 1983, 17 and 200.00 every Friday was bank) and he just finished some repairs to the Camaro he had, so we had plans, bankroll and wheels, we were set. We went to every club, music hall and stadium and saw bands like Slayer, Metallica and Judas Priest. We went to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and all over New York. When we came back we told all of our friends who could not get tickets what happened and presented them with souvenir shirts and posters and showed them bootleg tapes we got in the various parking lots vendor booths.

When we had 2 weeks left, that's when we got everything together for the camping trip, it was Richie, myself our friends Chris and Rob, we went up to a campgrounds in upstate New York, in Orange County. We set up camp next to a stream and found a grove of trees under which we set up camp, we brought enough stuff to last 1 week and 2 weekends, 10 days of nature. After day 4 we ran out of the beer and snack food, then Richie made a trip 10 miles to the store and brought back more beer, which at 17 was a necessity for woodland survival. One evening while adventuring through the woods we found an old cabin, long deserted and falling apart, we decided to move camp to spend the last 3 nights in the cabin, big mistake. We set the place up, and fixed the door so it would close and on the first night we partied and messed around, but when we went to go to sleep, every sound was straight out of a horror movie. Suddenly it started to pour rain, we thought it was great we found the cabin, but in the dark night the wind picked up and, no joke, the roof blew off and the entire cabin was exposed to the elements, frantically we pulled everything together and had to sleep in the car, 4 guys crammed into a Camaro at 5 am in a rainstorm. We were trying to get a grip on it all when the rest of the cabin collapsed, rich cried out "to hell with this" and we took off, driving through the rain in the country road and mud flying everywhere. We got back to our home town several hours later, 1 day early and soaking wet, so to make ourselves feel better we went to CBGB's in Manhattan and found out that Anthrax was playing an unannounced show, so we went in and it was a blast.

Looking back and writing about the events that took place that summer was cathartic in a way, life can become too full of issues and one can be overwhelmed by the day to day stuff. When you're 17 and you have the whole world ahead of you, life seems like an adventure, and we need adventure in our lives, not stress, I think I'm going to try to keep those feelings and memories alive.