About my weekend

This weekend was a whirlwind tour of New England, precipitateed by my brother's graduation. I left Nashville on Thursday afternoon and flew to Washington, then on to Boston. Then I rented a car at Hertz and wandered across the city to my friends' apartment in Cambridge. (And I do mean wandered -- apparently Hertz's NeverLost system hasn't yet figured out the Big Dig.) Finally arrived, and stayed up talking for several hours. The next morning, I left and picked my brother up. (He had flown in a few hours before me and spent the night with a friend from his college.)

We headed north into Maine, and arrived in Brunswick. My parents and three of my grandparents were already there, and had been killing time on campus. (The school has a museum dedicated to arctic explorers Robert E. Peary (Class of 1877) and Donald B. MacMillan (Class of 1898), and also an art museum.

The first big item on the agenda was the Baccalaureate ceremony. Afterward, we stopped by the president's reception, and then walked through the rain to get to the massive tents on the athletic fields for a the traditional lobster dinner. . After dinner we stopped by my brother's house, then headed back toward the Maine coast, where we had comamandeered a vacation house belinging to friends of my parents

Saturday morning dawned grey and wet, just like Friday. We drove back to campus and ate breakfast in the main dining hall. Then we headed over to the Quad, which was practically underwater. But Bowdoin has been having commencement exercises outdoors on the quad since 1806, and they weren't going to let a little rain stop them. (They had a backup plan to have it in the field house, but apparently there had to actually be a foot of standing water for that to happen.) The school was handing out ponchos and hot coffee. (See below for another picture.)

After getting drenched, we posed for the obligatory group photos. Then we headed back to the house and goofed off for most of the afternoon. (There are worse places to be stuck in a rainstorm than a house with a view of the sea. In the evening, we all piled into two cars and used the NeverLost gizmo to almost find our way to a restaurant in Portland, about 40 minutes to the south.

Singing in the rain: That's my brother singing the national anthem behind a sea of umbrellas at his graduation, Maine. May 24, 2003.

The next morning, I departed Maine and drove about 5.5 hours to get to Albany, where I met up with a bunch of my northern friends. Everyone had gone to Albany for the weekend for a party to celebrate Aaron's graduation from medical school. So I joined up with them just in time to play trivial pursuit, gorge on party leftovers, look at Italy slides, and stay up late playing cards and, err, taking care of the surplus alcohol problem.

The next morning, I got up very early, shook off a slight hangover, and drove three hours back through the pouring rain to catch my plane in Boston. And then back to Nashville. All-in-all, a very action-packed weekend, at least by my standards.