Students Share about their Spring Break Trips

Paris, France:

Senior Paige Gundelfinger spent her time over break walking the streets of Paris, with her three best friends by her side. Gundelfinger, along with seniors Ariana Sherk, Andrea Zecy and Alissa Pollack spent a week in Paris with Sherk’s parents. The Sherk family was willing to bring all four girls along with them because they’ve all been best friends since their freshman year. Staying at a small boutique hotel in the middle of local shops gave the girls a chance to experience the local color as opposed to the commercial, “touristy” side of the famous city.

One of the girls’ favorite things to do was to go out in the evening to visit local hot spots and enjoy Paris’s thriving night life. One night, the girls visited a club under the Alexander III bridge and got the opportunity to meet some of the locals.

“The guys were really funny,” Gundelfinger said. “Because they didn’t know any English, so it was really funny to try and talk to them.”

Gundelfinger enjoyed how peaceful and quiet the city seemed, not to mention beautiful. Her favorite place in Paris was Sacre Coeur, a famous cathedral that overlooks the city. The view was what fascinated Gundelfinger the most, “When you go out and walk around, it is so pretty,” Gundelfinger said. “Everything catches your eye and it is just so detailed.”

Riding the Metro around the city, dining at local cafés, and staring off the top of the Eiffel Tower made her trip to Paris Gundelfinger’s best spring break to date.

“It was the most amazing trip,”  Gundelfinger said. “I’m so happy I got to experience it with my best friends.”

Pomona, KS:

Senior Polly Mytinger steps out onto the golf course. I can do this, she thinks as she prepares to hit a golf ball while watching Senior Cole Turner demonstrate what to do.

“[He] swung back and knocked me on the head,” Mytinger said. “It was just one of those classic moments where you can’t not laugh.”

Turner and Mytinger were two of the 10 East seniors who went on a camping trip to Pomona, KS over spring break. While there, they spent some time frog-hunting and naming themselves after characters from “Lord of the Flies.”

Having recently been in an accident, Turner had just gotten out of surgery when they left, and according to Senior Emily Collins, he was “out of it.” Collins said that since his family was providing most of the camping materials, Turner had a lot of rules: they could only use phones to call home, they always had to close the door to the trailer and they couldn’t use cameras except for when they were on nature walks.

“[One of the rules] was that we couldn’t eat his baby food,” Collins said. “He broke his face before we went and he couldn’t eat [real] food.”

For Collins, the tournament they made up, “The Pomona Games,” was the highlight of the trip. Every time the group went camping, they participated in events such as throwing sticks, skipping stones, building structures out of rocks and lighting sticks on fire. At night, Mytinger enjoyed just spending time with the girls. They had their own trailer, and they gossiped about their first kisses. But having to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night was an obstacle.

“We held it,” Mytinger said. “It was dark and … it was just freaky.”

They shared a lot of great memories and they plan to go back again between the last day of school and graduation.

New York City:

Sophomores Annie Sullivan and AJ Orth’s Spring Break trip to New York together began with a two-day train ride where their main form of entertainment was people watching. A little girl ran back and forth with a crazed look in her eye and chocolate dried to her face, dodging the middle-aged woman doing yoga in the middle of the train aisles, who stood in the way of the lonely bartender who continuously hi-jacked the train intercom begging people to buy his Bloody Marys––only when the train conductor herself wasn’t speaking over the intercom, trying to entertain the passengers with her nonstop, poorly-thought-out jokes.

“‘We are coming in to Gettysburg! The Burgs of Getty! Getty! Getty! Getty! Gettysburg!’” Orth said, mimicking their train conductor, Andrea.

While in New York, Sullivan and Orth were able to find where “30 Rock” was being filmed that week from a website, and ended up going down to the set that was about 10 blocks from where the two and Sullivan’s parents were staying. Sullivan and Orth waited outside of Tina Fey’s trailer for a good three hours, until she finally came out to meet them.

“We talked about the weather and she was eating apples, so we talked about that, and then as she was leaving AJ blurted, ‘I love Mean Girls!” Sullivan said.

Dominican Republic:

Junior Devery North walks down a street with a group of kids in La Romana in the Dominican Republic. Some are local children from the community, some are members of the Village Presbyterian church and still others are workers from the construction site.  Hand in hand, they all make their way to the houses that the kids live in.

“Their homes are a nest, literally,” North said. “They are pieces that they have collected to make a structure that resembles a house.”

North was one of around 17 East students on this trip,  which is taken every year by the youth group. They go to work on building a school and offer medical help in the community.

“When we were building the school there were all these kids around us and we would build relationships with them and talk to them,” junior Carolyn Welter said.

They played with the kids during their breaks, and Welter enjoyed hanging out with a boy she nicknamed “Spiderman” because he was always climbing on things.

Since most of the people who went on the trip are in Spanish classes, they could communicate a little bit with the kids. But North said even then the language barrier wasn’t an obstacle. She had fun playing with a young boy named Alexis. One day, when they were working in an assembly line lifting cement buckets, he started laughing at her because she was covered from head to toe in cement. She tried to get him back for teasing her.

“I started to hug him, but he ran away,” North said. “So I chased him around for a bit.”

When it was time to leave, everyone gathered to say a prayer for the work they had done there. North said that she was sad to leave because she won’t be able to go on the trip again next year, so she’ll never see the kids again.

“These people have hope,” North said. “And they have every right to hold on to that hope.”

As if meeting their all time idol Tina Fey wasn’t enough, Sullivan and Orth also met her co-star Alec Baldwin on accident while walking home from dinner one night.

Orth and Sullivan spent most of their time seeing different shows on and off Broadway, which, as active members of the SME Theater Department, interested them the most. They were inspired by the people who have succeeded in New York doing what they love. After seeing Central Park, visiting the Museum of Natural History, fulfilling the fantasy of ordering a hot dog from a hot dog vendor and meeting their all-time idol, the two sophomore’s trip can be described in one short sentence:

“Together,” Orth said, “we did it.”