From Meijer to Madrid: Students make the most of fall break

From Meijer to Madrid: Students make the most of fall break

Caitlynn Rosieland smiles with her sister Emma before Basílica de la Sagrada Família in Barcelona.
Courtesy | Caitlynn Rosieland

When the readings just keep coming, the papers begin to pile up, and beautiful Hillsdale, Michigan, begins to look a little “same old,” fall break provides a day or two of relief. This year, some students used the short break to reorganize, reset, and take a much-needed trip to Meijer or Detroit — while others braved lakeshore wind, hiked deserts, and conquered Spain, metaphorically.

Sophomore Thatcher Debowski helped lead a three-day excursion in northern Michigan with the Outdoor Adventure Club.

“A trip up north is actually a longstanding tradition of the club,” Debowski said. “Usually we go to the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, which is a beautiful place.”

This year, an adventurous group of 15 left Hillsdale mid-morning on Thursday and made the four-hour drive to the Platte River campground in Glen Arbor, Michigan. Debowski said their site gave them numerous options for hikes and shopping.

“What’s really nice is that the Platte River campground is pretty central. It’s only about a five-minute drive to Lake Michigan and not far from other spots we wanted to see, so that gave us some options,” Debowski said.

The crew ate well, too. Debowski said the club charged a fee from each person who went, and the leaders were able to buy and cook good meals during the weekend. When they arrived at camp on Thursday, they ate chili and cornbread and watched the sun set over Lake Michigan.

On Friday, their only full day, they ate breakfast and drove north to hike Pyramid Point, a two-mile-round trip that takes hikers from farm fields to the top of a dune. From the place the group stopped on the dunes, Debowski said, they could see halfway across Lake Michigan.

We saw the Fox Islands, which we realized when we pulled it up on Google Maps was halfway across the lake,” Debowski said. “It’s one of the more narrow parts of the lake, but it was cool to see how clear it was.”

After another hike, the campers split up. Some explored the historic town of Glen Arbor. Debowski said the consensus favorite was Cherry Republic, a quaint store known for its Michigan-made cherry products. The others did a hike on Alligator Hill, according to Debowski.

“That hike was beautiful because it set off the lake a little bit. It was beautiful to see the dunes from a distance,” Debowski said.

The hikers met the shoppers in town and they headed back to camp together for a chicken dinner, which Debowski said proved more of a challenge than they thought it would be.

“We had one person slicing, one person wrapping the chicken in foil and one person cooking, but the fire didn’t cook as well as we thought it would, so it took much longer than we had hoped,” Debowski said. “At that point it was a race against time, because we wanted to see the sunset.”

Students on the Outdoor Adventure Club camping trip watch the sun set over Lake Michigan from Empire Bluff.
Courtesy | Thatcher Debowski

But the crew made it to the beach when the colors were still in the sky, and they started a fire under the stars despite the wind’s best efforts to suffocate it. The crew baked bread with their fire and stargazed.

“We saw the Milky Way clearly, and I was able to see the blurry outline of the Andromeda Galaxy through my binoculars,” Debowski said. “I thought the stars were good in Hillsdale, but head a little bit north and they are magnificent.”

Senior Tommy Smith visited the National Museum of Military Vehicles in Dubois, Wyoming, over fall break. He said the group he went with had the chance to see more than 250 combat vehicles from World War II through the War on Terror.

“Most of it was tanks and transportation vehicles but we also saw some boats from Normandy,” Smith said. “The coolest thing we saw was a Black Hawk helicopter.”

They also used their short time in Wyoming to visit Jackson Hole and Grand Teton National Park.

“It was an awesome experience. Not only seeing all the history and vehicles, but also getting to see Wyoming as a state for the first time was quite an experience — breathtaking,” Smith said.

Last Tuesday after classes, sophomore Caitlynn Roiseland drove to Fort Wayne, Indiana, and boarded a flight for Chicago. She flew from Chicago to Europe to kick off a whirlwind tour of Spain, where her sister is studying abroad for the semester.

After Roiseland arrived in Madrid on Wednesday afternoon, she and her family drove six hours to Barcelona. The next day, they visited La Sagrada Familia, a basilica designed by Antoni Gaudi. On Friday, Roiseland and her family rode the cogwheel train to Montserrat, where a thousand-year-old monastery and basilica sits on top of the mountain.

She also said her family took a wine tasting excursion at the Oller del Mas while they were on the mountain. The winery has remained in the same family for 36 generations.

“The whole mountain was beautiful,” Roiseland said. “And it was full of rich history.”

That night, the Roiselands made a four-hour drive to Valencia where they took family pictures and explored the town.

“In Valencia, we experienced firsthand the warmth and hospitality of the Spanish people through meeting my sister’s host family,” Roiseland said.

Her trip was a whirlwind but she said the experience outweighed the exhaustion.

“We packed in as much as possible for the four days I was there, and even though the time was short, the memories I made were invaluable,” Roiseland said.

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