Home For The Holidays

I’m sure some of you have or will be making a trip to pick up children who are away at college and returning home for the holiday break. Often this is something you only have to do when they are freshman because in most cases they don’t have a car and there are loads of laundry and other stuff making its way back into your house. The reason there was no Hometown View yesterday was because this was the position my wife and I were in with our daughter, who of course couldn’t make this a routine pick up and bring home trip.

We headed up to Penn State Tuesday afternoon and arrived just after Alex finished the last of her final exams. Like many she had spent just about all of her time the last week or so in the library studying which meant she had not done any packing. and in her case there was a lot of it because she and her roommate are switching dormitories for the spring semester, moving into one that houses most of the members of their sorority. So four months after lugging everything into a dorm in the heat of summer we were now going to take everything out in frigid temperatures and move it across campus. After dinner Tuesday we loaded some stuff into the car and left Alex, her roommate Nicole and another friend to pack. We went to our hotel as I desperately needed some sleep after a long day.

We woke up yesterday morning and the first thing my wife noticed on the TV was a pretty long list of delayed school openings. Fortunatly they were to the west of State College, but we were greeted by some show flurries and showers and 17 degree temperatures. We headed over to Alex’s dorm and started loading the van with bins, boxes and more…frankly I have no idea how they fit everything in their very small room. The good news for them is their new dorm is considerably larger although I guess that means there will even more stuff to move at the end of the spring semester but I’ll worry about that later. We did manage to move everything
and pile it on her bed because it has to stay that way so the room can cleaned over vacation. We made one more trip back to the old dorm to load all her clothes which she brought back for the 3-week break and we hit the road for the trip back home at 1:30.

Of course you know what this means? We have to go back with her in a little more than three weeks so set up the new room.