UW Stout and other stupidity.

Well friends. I did it. I finally headed out, overnight, without kids. For the first time in EVER. And it wasn't even with Ryan.

I headed East about 45 miles and landed square in Menomonie Wisconsin. My old alma mater. UW Stout. Polytechnic now. What the fuck is that? I have no idea. I graduated with a Vocational Rehabilitation degree. Weird.

Anyway I digress. It had been planned for a while. A few girlfriends of mine from college of whom I haven't seen for 9 years, and I decided to head out to see what had changed. Along the way, we invited a few more of our cohorts from the Fleming Hall days. And we only had one other taker. Our bold and daring friend Erik.

Here is Selena, me and Erik standing outside of the Student Center...no change by the way.

Even the seating in the Pawn (food dispensing locale) was exactly the same as it was when I graduated in 95. Gross....I ate there hung over. As a matter of fact I believe a friend of mine threw up on said chairs.

When we all started at Stout, we were on North campus. About a half a mile from the main campus. About a half a mile from any classes. And that half a mile was a bitch to walk when the temps got below 0 degrees Fahrenheit. Ooohweeee and if the wind was blowing...GGGAAAHHH!!!!

The only saving grace in the winter was on occasion the Swiss Miss factory close by would be wafting in the air. Otherwise in the fall, spring, and summer, you got the sewage plant.

The dorms are all crazy different. Our dear Fleming Hall is now being connected to the two other dorms behind it.

And just east of those dorms are these beauties! They have AC. Those lucky bastards.

We walked around campus for a few hours, in 91 degree weather. Kill me now. And I am sunburned. I'm Korean. I don't get sunburned...but son of a bitch if it wasn't hot.
Here is Andrea, Erik, and Selena at some kind of weird placard they "erected".

Oh and the Fortune Cookie is still there next to the Subway. Seriously. I'm not just pointing that out cause I'm Asian either. The damn restaurant looks EXACTLY the same. Anyone who lived on North campus has eaten that crap food and lived to tell the tale. Trust me.

So after our tour of campus, we drove by some of the old places we lived off campus. Not too thrilling. Just got us talking about all the dumb, illegal, immoral things we did back in the day. And we headed off to Eau Claire to have dinner and a few drinks and check into the hotel.

Once we headed to Eau Claire, there really wasn't anything going on. We went to dinner downtown. Then a few drinks. We tried to find places we wouldn't TOTALLY stick out in, but that's really hard to do in a college town when the three of us are circling the middle age drain. But we did ok. Until, that is, we decided to head to another bar called.....The Pickle. Jesus.

We walked down to it, and looked in the window. Harmless enough, but once we saw the plastic keg cups we were all, "fuck no!" Our days of, stashing plastic keg cups down our pants so we wouldn't have to pay the 5$ at the next party, are long gone. And we decided to mosey on back to the grown up bar. Which incidentally, drinks in Eau Claire Wisconsin..Dirt.Ass.Cheap.

Once we heard the tornado sirens go off, we decided to head back to the hotel. What a poor showing on our parts. But....meh...I was tired anyway.

Safely tucked into our hotel..the madness began. Talks of kids, marriage, boobs, showering, the olden days, and everything else under the sun were had. And before we knew it, it was 2:30 am. I had officially been awake for 22 hours at that point. Lame.

This is what the end of the night looked like....what a mess. I told you we were mature.

All in all a very nice trip down memory lane with a few friends. The only casualty we had was when Selena was imitating Kristen Stewart's hunch. She pulled a muscle in her neck and it was worse by the morning. God damn we're old.