Elaina M.
Day 1 January 5, 2010
When I woke up this morning, I had no idea what an exciting day I was about to experience. After we all arrived at the airport at a very early 7:00 a.m. and went through the standard security, we were so ready to get on the plane. Most of the girls (including me) were expecting a normal/large plane to take us to our first destination: Atlanta. When we started boarding we looked out the window and saw a smaller plane than most of us had ever been on; the girls on the trip took up about half of the seats.
Once we arrived in Atlanta, we had a 2 hour layover until our next plane arrived. After eating lunch and stocking up on gum, a lot of us decided to play a card game called SPIT. We were having so much fun playing the game and became unaware of the time. While Cece was dealing a new round, we heard the lady on the loud speaker announce that it was the last call for the plane to Baltimore and they were about to close the doors. In shock that we had missed the numerous warnings before, we quickly boarded the plane and took our seats (with the entire plane already full).
When we arrived in Baltimore, we were kindly greeted by KJ, our tour guide for the trip. We had an exciting bus ride with about 10 plasmas and were off to DC. Out of the bus, it is fair to say we were ALL ill-prepared for the cold weather. We quickly hurried inside the hotel to our rooms to get ready for the rest of the day – learning the metro and dinner.
We walked through George Washington University to the Foggy Bottom Metro Station, with KJ still guiding us. Dr. Cooper handed us each our metro passes and we all stared at the map of the Metro while trying to understand it and learn our stops. When we first got on the Metro around rush hour, we were shocked at the crowd. Along the course of learning the metro, we encountered a few speed bumps on the road. The first was when Madison Longmire’s Metro card stopped working unexpectedly, and the second when Caroline Miller’s card disappeared. We learned how to handle these situations if it happened while we were alone.
After all that standing and waiting in the cold, everyone was looking forward to our dinner at Tony Chang’s. The most interesting part of the dinner was the giant Lazy Susan to make the meal easier (since the menu was pre-determined). We had fun spinning the food and drinks around to the other side of the table and even made our own lingo by saying “Heads Up” before spinning it to warn everyone at the table.
We made a stop at a SafeWay on our way home to stock up on food during the trip.
Although we were extremely tired, we managed to stay up late back at the hotel. Almost all of the girls gathered into one room late at night and we had fun talking, laughing, and playing games. After a while we could barely open our eyes and decided it was time to go to bed. Once we were back in our room, we set every alarm clock possible to make sure we would not sleep in through the morning. We went to bed with nerves for what work in the real world would be like in the morning.
