At the end of each year, CVCA sends seniors and about twenty chaperons off for a few days on Senior Trip, a trip designed to bring the class together one last time, celebrate their impending graduation, enjoy general fun and goofing off, and take an opportunity to help the students with some good advice about their futures and their faith as they move ahead apart from the fairly protected environment of CVCA. This year, Senior Trip went to Maumee Bay State Park near Toledo, which is a beautiful state beach and associated lodge, resort, and cabins.

I drove Mer’s car to Maumee Bay; we both find it useful to have a car on site, and school bus seats destroy my back if I have to be on them more than an hour (it is about a two-hour drive). I got to the beach side of the park, where everyone was going to meet, and I beat the buses there, although the school vans were already there. The buses showed up about fifteen minutes later. We all assembled in the handy amphitheater for a general welcome session, at which team shirts were handed out (cabins were organized into informal teams of twenty students), and general rules were gone over; the gist was “have fun, but behave yourself.”

Since the CVCA chaperons were supposed to provide a grilled lunch and the grill had shown up late, we kicked in Plan B, which took the form of a tug-of-war contest on the beach. Jay Peters, a social studies teacher and basketball coach, did a magnificent job of running the tug of war between various teams for about forty-five minutes while the food cooked. By then, lunch was ready, and everyone sat around and ate before proceeding back to the amphitheater for the start of the “Senior Games.”

The “Senior Games” was the brainchild of Jay and the other coordinator, Booch. They wanted the kids to have fun, but it also never hurts to make the kids a bit tired as well. So, Booch and Jay came up with six stations, widely spread apart, through which teams had to rotate to finish certain competitions. Puzzles had to be finished, basketball shots had to be made on the basketball court, tennis had to be played, a five-gallon bucket had to be filled with Dixie cups, a hill had to be climbed, and once everyone was at the top, trivia questions had to be answered. In the amphitheater was the event of which I was in charge, with help from Mer and another teacher, LT. For us, the kids had to dance an Irish dance called The Walls of Limerick. The way the dance is set up, it allows for any number of couples, so everyone on the team had to dance for us. The kids were super-game souls, and really seemed to enjoy it; a few even said it was their favorite competition. Mer and LT and I had a blast.

The Senior Games took us until about 3:30 in the afternoon. We then all assembled again, and we were given our cabin keys and headed over to the cabin side of the park. I had a cabin with six guys, five of whom I knew already. Supper was at 5:00, so the guys spent the ninety minutes or so unpacking and then lounging around playing video games on their phones while talking. That was okay – the Senior Games had been pretty taxing.

Supper was in the lodge, and was excellent – it was a Southwest evening with regular and soft-shelled tacos. After supper, we went over to the next room, where Jay delivered a good message – he stressed to the kids that as they moved on from CVCA, 1) they had choices, 2) they always had options, and 3) they were responsible for the consequences of their choices. Jay fleshed it out with examples from his own life and from the lives of people he knew, as well as backing things up with Biblical passages. It was a good and timely message.

After that, students either had free time, or were to pile on buses to go go-carting and mini-golfing. I went with that group of about 120 students – I had not been go-carting in over fifteen years, and I was eager to try it again. Sadly, it rained some on the way over to the Toledo area, so we had to wait about forty-five minutes for the track to dry before we could drive. The batting cages and mini-golf were open, although the batting cages were a bit wild while the balls were still wet. Once the track opened up, I got in four or five runs, and it was an absolute blast. The carts’ center of gravity was so low that you could floor them and not have to use the brakes, although it took some nerves on some of the corners to go in at twenty to twenty-five miles per hour. We did not finish up there until about 12:45 in the morning, and so we did not get back to the cabins until almost 2:00 am. I was a bit tired, and I fell asleep almost instantly for my five hours of sleep.