Wal-Mart Adventure

"Well hey you guys, my name is Katie and i'm going to be sharing a toilet with you for the next several months." —This is the first message I ever received from one of my freshman roommates in college. She had decided to take the initiative and e-mail me and the one other girl she would be rooming with.  We e-mailed back and forth several times before we got more domestic and got each others numbers so we could text.  Each email was dripping with exuberance as we both tried to make the most positive impression we could on our soon-to-be apartment-mate.

Katie e-mailed me something cute and up-beat like, "I'm on a scholorship for drama this year but don't get too freaked out i don't take myself very seriously. I got a chance to look at our appartment.  Its one of the closest to the bus stop and we have a nice view out of our room windows. Your room has a normal closite and a largish walk in closite with a buch of shelves and there is another closite in the hall." With another e-mail adding, "dang i didn't spell check that.  you guys might as well know that i'm embarrassingly bad at spelling.  sorry i'd had hoped to keep that to myself until you had at least seen me in my pajamas."


So I responded with something comparably sunny and badly spelled.  "Hi Katie, my name's Laura, I'm one of your room mates.  It's nice to kind of meet you - I've been meaning to e-mail you for the past two weeks (i guess you beet me to it :) Ashley (our other roomate) and I cumulatively have a waffle iron, two cookie sheets, and a possible toaster, as far as cooking items."  With such a fantastic assortment of cookware we probably would have been alright, but we all decided to get together about a week and a half before the move-in date and go on a shopping spree for usefully apartment appliances.  —It would be a fun roommate-bonding kind of thing.

Ashley, Katie, and I all met up at the apartment and made a list of things we thought we would need.  Toilet paper, dish soap, a mop, a bucket, paper towels . . . nothing else really came to mind.  The first real mistake we made was deciding that each of us (because all three of our freshman selves had cars) should drive separately to the local Wal-mart, which was in a different city.  I believe our reasoning for this was because we weren't sure if one car would be big enough to carry back all the crazy cleaning supplies we were going to buy (mops are not that big).

Katie was out of state, Ashley and I were both from close-by and should have been relatively familiar with our surroundings—should have been, being key here.  I finally volunteered to lead our driving parade after we all stared at each other awkwardly out in front of our cars.

Me: "I'll drive first since I know where Wal-mart is." —which was a lie, I was only 70ish% sure I knew how to get to Wal-mart.

Ashley:  "Alright, and then Katie can follow you and I'll drive behind her."

Me: "Brilliant."

I was worried enough about leading everyone astray that my hands were shaking when I climbed into my car.  I pulled out of the parking lot, Katie pulled out, Ashley pulled out, and we were off.

The first thing to do was to get on the freeway heading south—which I knew how to do.  What I didn't know how to do was to wait at a stoplight so that I didn't lose my friend who was following me.  I got on the freeway, I watched for Katie, I saw a car I thought might be here pull in front of me and pass me . . .

I drove to Wal-mart, without a car (two cars actually) following me, and sat in the parking lot fretting.  I finally texted Katie and told her which exit she should have taken.  I got a call from Ashley about five or six minutes later.  Katie had indeed gotten lost, she had started following a different car that was not mine and had followed it off a random exit and down a long deserted road that wound around through random fields—and Ashley, as a more responsible roommate-to-be than me, had followed her and the random car she was following.

After being followed down a very rural and untrafficked road for an extended amount of time, the leading car (understandably) began to get worried.  It wasn't until the car pulled over to the side of the road, which Katie obediently did too, that my lost roomate realized she wasn't following me anymore.  If they had had a conversation before the lead car went speeding away it would likely have gone something like this:

Us: Hi, we're freshman, we're looking for Wal-mart.

Slightly less freaked-out stranger: In the middle of a deserted field?

Us: Oh.

Luckily Ashley was able to redirect Katie and herself back to our meet-up, and the car they had been following sped away and never stopped to find out the true story of why two strange cars were following them.  So then, after successfully frightening a complete stranger, we finally got on with our Wal-mart spree.

We bought toilet paper, a mop, and soap (which we each drove back with in our separate cars), and never realized quite how ridiculous our experience was until several years later when we actually thought about what we had done. 

So ends one of the MANY escapades of my freshman year.