Flashback: MTU Trip – Day 3
Go back in time with us as we recount our epic 46-hour round trip bus adventure to Houghton/Hancock for the MTU Spring Career Fair. Just for fun, we pulled this 3-part blog series out of the vault (along with the photo of me in my fleece Labatt pond hockey helmet) to commemorate the 9-year anniversary of the trip Andrea Kerbuski and I made when we were both still working together at Capital Area Michigan Works! (looking back at the crap I put her through, its amazing that we’re still friends today!)
The bus pulled up to MTU’s Memorial Union Building at 12:08 a.m. on Wednesday morning. This was a huge relief for Andrea and me, because there had been conflicting information about exactly where the bus would pick us up and the thought of missing our ride and potentially having to spend another full (unplanned) day in Houghton/Hancock was making our last few hours in town a little stressful. Initially we were told that we would need to catch the bus at a stop out front of the Little Caesar’s, but then we learned that the bus also made a second pick-up on campus. We chose to wait at “ The MUB”—since it was open until 1 a.m. and we would be able to wait inside out of the cold. At this point, Andrea and I had both burned through all but $2.25 of the cash we had brought with us, and were down to a travel package of “Nutter Butter” cookies (which we quickly consumed – mostly out of pure boredom), a king sized Reese’s peanut butter cup and a canister of Pringles. We used the last little bit of cash that we had left to purchase a Mountain Dew and Diet Pepsi from the vending machine. A little joke backfired on me when I took Andrea’s partially consumed soda and softly tossed it out the locked doors onto the sidewalk of the entrance where we were waiting – apparently she has this weird phobia about shaking up bottles of pop and got seriously mad at me because in her words, “It’s not going to be fizzy anymore!” which she followed with a chorus of “I hate you, I hate you” (yeah, like I haven’t heard that one before).
Andrea started talking to me again just in time to board the bus, and then both of us totally crashed. We slept the entire 3 ½ hours on the way to Escanaba where we had to get off the bus, wait 20 minutes in the station, before boarding a second bus which would take us the rest of the way to Lansing. It was hard to tell exactly when daybreak happened, but based on the amount of natural light we started noticing in the bus cabin, I would guess that it must have been shortly before or after we had stopped in Sault Ste. Marie. By the time we crossed back over the bridge, the sun had climbed a couple of inches above the horizon, visible out in the distance over a frozen Lake Huron.
Although there was a sense of accomplishment from having completed our mission, and I was actually able to get at least a few hours of rest – the return trip to Lansing was, in one word, painful. By this point, the exhaustion, state of constantly being on the go and not being able to shower or change our clothes began to take its toll on us. I tried to pass the time by doing some work on my laptop, but Andrea wasn’t faring as well. She started carrying on random conversations with a volleyball she nick named “MacGregor.” Clare once again represented our salvation, and when the bus stopped to refuel we took advantage of the opportunity to grab some McDonald’s. A possible crisis was averted when Andrea was able to “borrow” not one, but two straws from Subway—one to replace the original McDonald’s straw that had a crack in it, and a second to replace the first Subway straw that fell out of my chocolate shake and onto the parking lot in the process of trying to remove the broken McDonald’s straw.
The long trip back to Lansing also provided plenty of time for deep contemplation and introspective thought. Once the 46-hour journey had ended, and the throngs of excited IT Council members dispersed from our welcoming home celebration at the Lansing Greyhound Bus station, I wondered how people will look back at this journey. Selfishly, I hope that Kerbuski and Knapp will one day be mentioned along side of the other great explorer teams in history like Lewis and Clark, Armstrong and Aldrin, Sam and Froto. But what I really want is for our children and grand children to be able to grow up in a world with direct bus routes from Lansing to Houghton/Hancock. To have them appreciate the sacrifices made by previous generations and to one day be able to make the same trip that had taken their grandparents 15 hours to complete, in just a little over 10. So maybe I’m a dreamer, but that’s my sappy, little Disney fairy tale ending wish.
We must have had a major tailwind coming down from Canada, because we were able to shave 1 ½ hours off the return trip, making it home in 13 ½ hours (setting a new record for an Indian Trails coach). We pulled into the Lansing station and although there was no crowd there to greet us, it didn’t matter – what was important was that the Capital Area IT Council was able to build a little bit more of that pipeline up to MTU. It won’t happen overnight, or even in 46 hours, but efforts like our “Career ExhibIT” program will expose that many more students and faculty to our local IT industry, and we’ll start to see more students from MTU and elsewhere connecting with our local IT companies and opportunities.
Its 3 p.m. and the journey has finally come to an end. It’s time to head home for some much-needed R&R and get ready for tomorrow’s MSU Engineering Expo. And then it will be time to begin planning for next year’s adventure up to Houghton/Hancock. What could I possibly do to top this year’s adventure? Join the crew of a Great Lakes freighter? Hitch hike up there? Convince Bil Moore to ride with me up there on a moped “Dumb and Dumber” style? You’ll have to tune in later to find out.