Being home has made me nostalgic.  I’m thinking about my past trips around NL and one of them is from way, way back in 2001.  My friend, Kendrick (not her real name), and I decided to spend our winter break in St. John’s with a couple other friends of mine.  They were at MUN, but they had plenty of room on their dorm floor for us to stay over. 

To set up one of my stories, the campus has “MUNnels” – a tunnel system that connects the university and dorms.  They’re only open at certain times, but you can travel through parts of the campus by MUNnel and not have to go outside.  This was convenient, since this trip was during winter break.  Winter.  In St. John’s.  It’s not bad (compared to the East Coast of NL), but the city had gotten more than the usual amount of snow that year. 

We were all planning on going out one night and we thought we’d just go through the MUNnels.  There was just one little problem – they were locked.  Now my friends knew a way to get through these doors (which I will never tell), even though they were locked, so we got into the tunnel system and proceeded to make our way to our destination. 

When we arrived, we found a problem.  The magic trick with the doors only worked one way.  The door we were at was facing the wrong way.  We were essentially trapped.  If we went back the way we came we’d find a door that was the wrong way, so we started looking for any door that could get us out of here.  The next door we found was the wrong way and I started thinking that we’d be trapped in here until morning.  Strangely enough, the idea didn’t freak me out.  I can think of worse people to be trapped in a MUNnel with.

Finally we found a door that we could get through and we ended up in the basement of one of the other campus dorms.  If I recall correctly, that’s when we decided to stay in for the night, order pizza and watch a movie.

My other story is about how Kendrick and I went to the waterfront one day.  It was cold, but we walked around the downtown area, looking at comics and stuff.  Kendrick had the idea to go to Ches’s Fish and Chips, which was/is a St. John’s staple.  The problem (you knew this was coming) was that we had no idea where it was.  We’d passed it on the bus ride down, but we didn’t know the street or anything.  And remember, this was before smart phones and all that crap that makes life easier these days.

Our decision was to walk uphill.  We were down, Ches’s was up, so we headed in that general direction.  After walking for a bit we came across the weirdest thing – a building painted like a cow.  Turns out we’d stumbled upon Moo Moo’s Ice Cream. 

The only logical decision was to give up our hunt for fish and chips and go for ice cream instead.  I remember having an amazing Turtle Cheesecake Ice Cream.  Maybe it was because we were so hungry, or maybe it was because winter makes ice cream taste better, or maybe it was because the Turtle Cheesecake ice cream was indeed amazing.  Once we were finished we decided we were done with downtown, so we almost froze our butts off waiting for a bus to take us back to campus.

Even though these stories aren’t particularly “epic”, that trip was fantastic.  Well, except for the demon child on the bus on the way from CB to St. John’s, but that’s a story I’d honestly rather forget.