GSVU

Breaks and vacations are a weird time in college life. Everybody looks forward to them, and they have (especially spring break) a reputation about them: break is when you are supposed to let go, go all out, take a little vacation from your busy school life.

The problem is that most college students don't have any money. And your professors have given you lots of homework over the break (I am assuming ot keep us honest). And airfare and hotels and just vacationing in general are sooo expensive. So you stay at the dorm.

I had a fantastic spring break – last years, in fact. My ex roommate is fantastic at finding reasonable vacation rentals, and plane tickets to Puerto Rico can be, as it turns out, less expensive than a ticket to California. By quite a bit. So my roommate did her research and worked her magic and found us a very cheap hotel (the trick, apparently, is to go for the hotels that, instead of being directly on the beach, are across the street), and we spent four days of our break in Puerto Rico.

  I felt very adventurous. We managed to figure out how to get a rental car and how to find the rain forest and even the bioluminescent bay full of bioluminescent plankton. The bioluminescent bay was the most expensive part of the trip once we were there. Really, it was idyllic, one of those vacations that you dream about but do not think actually exist anywhere for anyone.

  I just wish that I had that same intuition my old roommate has when it comes to researching travel stuff. I have often wondered how she knows where to look for these deals.