SPRING BREAK creeped up on us without warning. There we were, merrily working away at college stuff, when bam, it hit us -- in just two weeks we would be free of the shackles of work and worry.

At least, for a very limited time.

And so Chris, Jeanne, Wayne, Josh, Greg, and I gathered in Wayne's room, drank a few beers, and assembled the key facts that would guide us in our decision about what variety of hedonism a bunch of down-and-out college students could indulge in.

• FACT: This was to be our last spring break together. In just a short two months, we would be graduated and scattered to the four corners of the earth; some to the Bahamas, others to Berkeley, and others to even more exotic locales like New York City.

• FACT: We had to get the hell out of Swarthmore, the hell out of Pennsylvania, the hell out of academia.

• FACT: Our brains had been working so hard that we had, in defiance of all known neurological science, actually grown extra neurons. It was high time that we kill large portions of this pesky grey goop.

• UNSPOKEN FACT: Mr. Christopher Gustavo Fanjul was hoarding about 20 bottles of fine wine. Unless we placed him in an appropriately romantic and bizarre setting the glorious juice of Bacchus would never flow down our parched throats.

• VERY POINTED FACT: Beach houses along the Outer Banks of North Carolina are reasonably cheap in the off-season.

And thus, drawing upon the power of the Mighty Internet, we quickly found a cheap beach house on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Its name was the Wil-sun, and it was chosen because:

• It had a hot tub.
• It was octagonal and painted a friendly shade of mustard.
• It had a hot tub.
• The top floor was one giant room with a 360 degree view.
• Did we mention that it had a hot tub?
• There was a large deck around the hot tub.

The key feature of the Wil-sun, if you have not yet picked up on it, was the hot tub. The hot tub was key to our plans. Granted, we had no plans other than a hazy notion of sitting in the hot tub and drinking margaritas. And as it turns out, that pretty well sums up our spring break. Mmmmm... hot tub...

Complications and Preparations:

Josh, for reasons we shan't get into, was a weenie and dropped out at the last minute. We felt bad for our homie. At the same time, we felt like beating the shit out of him, both on general principle (Wayne would frequently come home at night and offer to beat the shit out of Josh) but also on the principle of broken brotherhood. Thus teary eyed and downhearted we left Swarthmore on a cold, gray April morning and began our trek down South.

Of course, before going anywhere we had to get stocked up. No, I'm not talking about food: I'm talking the essentials here. Boooze. Booooooozzzzzeeee. The drink of the devil. The stuff that's dandier than candy. NyQuil sans Quil -- you know what I'm talking about. So we dropped by Liquor world and bought 100 bottles of beer, not shitty beer like Pabst or Natty Light but Grolsh, Guiness and Sam Adam's Summer Ale. We bought wine to supplement Chris' "donation." We bought tequila and vodka (Grey Goose, which is good stuff) and rum and whiskey. The astute reader may perform some mental math and interject in tones of concerned outrage, "hey, wait a minute! For a six day trip with 5 people, that's a lot of alcohol!" Yes it is. Yes it is.

Since you don't have a calculator and you're a lazy net-surfing slob, I'll do the math for you. Assume we had 100 bottles of beer, 15 bottles of wine, one bottle of tequila, one bottle of rum, one bottle of whiskey, and one bottle of vodka. There are, as we've said, 5 people and 6 days. You loose day #6 to driving, so that's 5 useful days of drinking. Each person is thus responsible for a daily ration of:

• 4 bottles of beer
• 4 glasses of wine
• 1.5 shots of each hard alcohol

Not impossible. Not a good idea, but not impossible.

As it turns out, we were unable to approach this ration which in retrospect is a happy turn of events because it means we are still very much alive with complete livers. We put a good dent in our stash, though.

The drive to the Outer Banks from Philadelphia sucks. Pull out a map and you'll see what I mean -- there's a pesky bay smack dab in the middle of everything. You either have to go through the DC beltway or through southern Delaware, neither of which is pleasant. DC is out of the way and the beltway is No Fun; on the other hand, in accordance with an 1832 law every road in Delaware has a stop sign every 20 feet and at every point along the way you can spy a strip mall. On the way down we opted for the Delaware route, which took about 8 hours all told. We set out in a Toyota 4-Runner SUV (big) and a bright blue Geo Metro (small).

By the time we arrived in Avon, North Carolina, it was dark and we were tired and cranky. In a moment of despair, the troops even considered being antisocial and not drinking for a while. But then divine inspiration lit a ray of hope in our lives when, as we approached the Food Lion supermarket, we ran across a giant banner advertising M. beer. This was as good a sign as any that Wayne M., and by extension all of us, were required by all that is good and holy to drink up. So we did just that.