too young for a senior trip

After high school graduation, I left for Myrtle Beach with my four best friends. We had enough IDs that read 18 to ensure everyone would get to peak inside Mother Fletchers, and a box of wine coolers, hidden in another friend's shed, we picked up on the way out of town. To this day I still don't know how those party favors were procured...

Summer, 1995

Our parents certainly didn't encourage this trip, but it's just what kids in our hometown did, so they let us go. I can't believe our mothers, who enforced curfews and rules about being alone with boys, let us just....leave. We seemed too young to take a a senior trip, a trip without some grown-ups...but off we went from Tennessee to South Carolina. 


Today I'm meeting up with these same girls for another beach trip, our first together in five years. Some of us still had to check with our moms before confirming travel dates; now there are babies that need sitting.


The next few days will include lots of relaxing and reminiscing..and plenty of dinner party questions, I'm sure.  These ladies will humor me as I drag them to see where JFK, Jr. got married, just as I will indulge them when it comes time to shop for the children. There will be no wine coolers. There will be no posing in bikinis. 

There will, however, be some party favors -  tacky-but-cute custom koozies -  and the hope that when we do reach our AARP years we'll still be taking trips together, sipping some kind of youth tonic....that we'll still be the kind of citizens too young to take a 'senior' trip.