Alright, here we go!

Spring Break 2K11 has descended upon Boston College!  The jets flying to Punta Cana, Miami, Barcelona, and other prime destinations are packed with eager co-eds who have been looking forward to their Spring Break festivities since they first talked about "...that all inclusive resort in Cancun" with their 4 best buddies back in December.  Well, apparently my homework isn't the only thing I procrastinate with because my spring break destination was not finalized until about 3:00 pm on Saturday.  I had originally planned to go to Washington DC and stay with a family friend for the week.  And then that morphed into going to DC and meeting up with a guy I live down the hall from and going to the Outer Banks with him.  I finally settled on a destination as I was looking at the Interactive Route Atlas on Amtrak's website.  I followed the red squiggle from Boston, down to New York, a skip further to Philadelphia, kept traveling onto Washington DC, but then my eyes kept following the tracks south until I saw "Charleston, SC."  So Sunday night I'm getting on a train in Boston at 10 pm and arriving in Charleston at 7 pm on Monday.

     Of the few people that were still around when I bought my tickets on Amtrak, the overwhelming questions were "Oh, who do you know down there?" and "What are you going to do?"  The respective answers to these are "Not a soul and I haven't a clue."  There is the College of Charleston in downtown and its student body is split 64/36 female.  I guess it's a good place to go to meet new people.  As far as what I'm going to do, those options appear to be quite numerous.  There are beaches nearby, the USS Yorktown is across the peninsula, and I've heard the town itself is nice to walk around.  The most interesting question of this trip so far is "Joseph, where are you staying?"

    Now, in my defense, I did look up a hostel before I clicked the "purchase" button for my train tickets. What I didn't do though is click the "room availability" button.  Yowza.  Luckily there were rooms available for the 1st and 3rd nights that I will be staying in Charleston.  This only gets better.  After reading reviews and determining that there was only one hostel in Charleston that would actually be better than just sleeping in the streets, I started to ponder where else I could sleep.  A brilliant idea came to me but my excitement was quickly shattered when I saw that it was $25 for a camping permit and on top of that I don't even have my sleeping pad out in Boston.  I'll just go throw a hammock in between trees by the beach before I pay the same price as a night in the hostel to camp.  I was just starting to contemplate my odds of meeting some local college kids that would befriend me and offer me a place to stay when another (maybe brilliant/not so brilliant) idea came to me- couch surfing.  I have heard of the concept but never done it or known anybody that has.  Couchsurfing.org is a website that you join and make a profile on and can search for other members in your destination and request their couch for a couple of nights.  So I've spent about 2 hours today looking through profiles of Couch Surfers and sending "CouchRequests" to the ones that deemed trustworthy.  It seems like a very open-minded, trustworthy community so I'm not terribly worried about anything, but I know my mom will be when/if she reads this so I just want to say "Mom, I'll be ok and will call you if I need you to come pick me up."  I've got 2 twenty hour train rides ahead of me in the next week so the blogs should be rolling out.  Cheers.