The Catalina Trip
As our boat approached Catalina Island for our 7th grade class trip, we saw dolphins swimming alongside us. We considered this a good sign, an indicator of a fun weekend to come. However, many parts of our little vacation didn’t end up going too well.
Dinner was all right. We arrived at about 4 and ate at 5:30. They served a decent pasta with red sauce, which I covered with parmesan and ate four bowls of. My friends and I went to the juice machine and discovered some kind of pomegranate juice, which we deemed “ok” compared to the other watery and barely potable juices. This is where the first inconvenience happened- Some kid named Raphael decided he would fill his entire thermos with pomegranate juice and proceeded to exhaust the entire supply. My friends and I ran to the camp administrators and asked them when the pomegranate juice would be back. The camp guy said it would be a week till the next food shipment arrived, which was annoying because we were only there for 3 days. That is how we ended up drinking boxed orange juice that tasted funny (One worldly 8th grader told us it tasted like weed, but I thought it tasted more like dirt).
Going to bed was an ordeal. Last trip, we’d been about 5 to a cabin, but I guess our budget tightened since then, because our cabin contained about 20 kids. This meant that the already stuffy cabin began to overheat and started smelling like sweat. At around 1 in the morning, some girls came around the cabin trying to get me to go outside with them, along with a couple of my friends. We declined because we all just wanted to sleep at that point. However, another kid tried to talk to them and was promptly rejected. He then began stalking around the cabin (He had ADHD and god knows what else and I’m pretty sure he was off his meds) muttering incoherently and keeping us all awake. I don’t know how he got his hands on a glow stick, let alone one that long, but he did, and he started whipping us with it as he walked around the cabin. We had all taken off our shirts due to the heat, and getting slapped by a glow stick like that really hurt. We retaliated by throwing him out of the cabin and locking him out, at which point he started yelling and proceeded to get apprehended by a counselor, who took him to the administrators’ cabin to sleep under supervision.
The next day, I ate the single most atrocious breakfast that I have had in my life. I have eaten breakfast at countless seedy motels across the U.S., but none of them hold a candle to the Catalina breakfast. There were potatoes with the texture of car tires and beans that looked like they’d been canned during the Nixon administration, but the main lowlight of the breakfast was the scrambled eggs. The eggs were rubbery, definitely powdered, and assumed the shape of the container they were served in. Before we realized how bad the situation was, my friends and I all piled our plates with eggs. This left us in a bind. When we arrived at the dining hall the night before, a school administrator had said that we could not leave a single crumb of food waste on our plates. This left us with a large amount of awful scrambled eggs that we did not want to eat and yet had to eat, or else. Many kids simply scarfed down the eggs, holding their noses or using other techniques. I washed down half of my eggs at once like they were pills, and then wrapped the rest in a napkin to hide them when I threw them into the garbage. My friend Will crammed all of his eggs into his mouth at once. His screams still haunt me to this day.
We had activities like kayaking and scuba diving, but I don’t remember them too well. Mostly, I remember the in-between stuff. For example, we played some ball game with kids from other schools. One kid from another school, who was “out”, complimented my friend Hunter on some youtuber merchandise he was wearing. Hunter, who was in the middle of a heated round of the game and also antisocial, did not respond. This became an exchange of insults, which devolved into Hunter getting shoved by the kid’s friend, picking up a tree branch, and winging the kid with it. Teachers broke up our spirited fight, but the damage was done
I don’t remember much else about Catalina, probably because the rest of the trip went off without a hitch. This shows me that sometimes, the funniest and best memories from a journey are of what went wrong, not of what went right.
