Our College Trip

On this day last year, the Thursday before Easter, the four of us took off on a 1,700 mile college visiting tour. The girls and Peter had Good Friday off and then the whole following week was spring break, so we had an extended amount of time available for travel. Emma was planning to be at music camp for 6 weeks during the summer, so we wouldn’t have much time in the summer to look at colleges. Also, we really wanted to see schools while they were in session so we could talk to professors and students and sample the food in the cafeteria. We had gotten a chance to see a small number of New England schools in February. We decided this was our chance to see the schools she was interested in that were further away.


To tell you the truth, the trip didn’t get off to the greatest start. Emma hadn’t followed through on a commitment she had made and that derailed our departure. We were already planning to start our first 5 hours of driving at 4 pm, but we didn’t end up hitting the road until much more like 5 pm.  We hit some bad traffic in New York and New Jersey because of our late start, but still managed to get to our hotel in College Park, MD by 10:30 pm. We were all tired and grumpy by then, though, so we went right to bed.


The next day, things started to go better. Emma and Peter got up early and went for a morning tour and information session at the University of Maryland. Sarah and I hung out at the hotel pool and had breakfast. We promised Sarah that she would not have to visit every single campus on the tour. In the afternoon, we all visited Goucher, which both Emma and Sarah loved. We found a crab house for dinner and had a blast breaking open crab shells with mallets and devouring the spicy crabmeat inside. In the process, we got covered in crab juice and the spices they put on the outside of the shells. Wet naps were not much help to us as we tried to clean up. We all agreed that meals at that restaurant should come with a complimentary shower.


After dinner, we headed down to visit Peter’s parents who lived about 45 minutes away. We stopped at a mall on the way to get them an Easter gift. Emma and Sarah picked out some headbands at a store in the mall and were more than a little embarrassed when the sales clerk asked them if they had just had crabs. Those wet naps definitely had not done the job!


We spent the weekend with Peter’s parents and decorated eggs, went bowling, celebrated Easter and took in a baseball game at Camden Yards. Then on Monday, we were back to our college touring. We traveled from Maryland to Pennsylvania, then to Ohio, back to Pennsylvania, and finally to upstate New York. Along the way we bowled, played miniature golf, watched movies, listened to music, and ate at restaurants good and bad. I played skeeball on the iPod Touch for hours on one leg of our journey, managing to get my name in about 5 of the 10 high score spots. But then I handed the Touch to Emma and in about a half hour she had wiped me out and occupied all but two of the top positions.


Emma got very involved in the visiting process. She asked questions on the tours, went to classes, rehearsed with the band at one of the schools, and ate in many of the school cafeterias. On the advice of a colleague, I had bought Emma her very own camcorder to use to record these visits so she could look back at them later. She filmed some of the tours, but mainly the camera was used to record Emma’s reaction afterwards. Sarah would man the camera as we were driving away from each school and interview Emma about her reaction and thoughts. So many times she was saying she could picture herself at the school and was looking forward to college more than she had been. Many of the schools we visited were on the “Colleges that Change Lives” list and we were impressed by the individualized approach they took to higher education. The faculty at these schools were teachers, not professors; the distinction being that they were committed to their students, not their subjects. Emma was very bright and a good student, but we knew she needed that personal approach. We were thrilled to find schools that did it so well.


Mile after mile, hour after hour, we found that we were really enjoying this college trip. It’s probably the most concentrated amount of time we had spent together in a long time and, amazingly, we didn’t get on each other’s nerves. I think that all of us had anticipated the trip with a little bit of dread, but by the end we all had to admit that it was really fun.


Of course, now that trip seems like such a gift. We were with Emma every minute of every day for ten days, just soaking her up. We had no idea that time was short, but that’s what we would have done if we had known – not necessarily the driving 1,700 miles part, but definitely the just being together part.


And the other gift is the recording done with that camcorder I gave her. I meant those recordings to be a tool for picking her next school, but now they are like a treasure, capturing the image, the voice, the gestures, the laugh, the singing, the smile of our 17 year old Emma just two months before we lost her forever. I haven’t been able to look at those recording yet, but I can’t tell you how much comfort it gives me to know that they are there.