By Cailin Rork / Features Reporter and Copy Editor
From COVID-19 cases to weird people on planes, many students have some crazy stories.
Going on trips to places like New York City, Scotland and Italy, the Harpeth Hall honeybears traveled across the globe. While these vacations were valuable opportunities, not all of their experiences were exclusively positive.
Freshman Madi Whiteley went on a family trip to Italy this summer. She enjoyed the trip, until the flight back, when she encountered some bizarre people.
At the beginning of the flight, a woman asked Whiteley to switch seats with her, so she could sit next to her fiancé. Since she already was not sitting with her family, Whiteley accepted the offer and moved seats.
“She would always grab my chair and use it to stand up and stick her feet with no shoes so far under my seat that I could touch them,” Whiteley said, describing the woman.
Whiteley’s comments hit upon a fear of strangers invading personal space, but she remained too polite to say anything throughout both interactions.
“A guy with super short shorts and a polo would always be going into the overhead luggage right next to me with his butt in my face,” Whiteley said.
While it was an uncomfortable experience for Whiteley at the time, she is now able to look back on and laugh at this bizarre interaction.
Senior Veronica Pierce traveled to Scotland and Ireland with her family. Things turned sour pretty quickly into the trip when her family’s flight got delayed by five hours and then completely canceled at midnight. Fortunately, they were able to catch another flight later and made it safely to Europe.
Later on in the trip, their car lost all its battery while they were “in the middle of nowhere in Ireland,” Pierce said. Her family then had to call a local who was hilariously confused about what they were trying to ask about a car repair company.
Senior Lena Qian, while in New York City, had some difficulties with her credit card, and it would not work when trying to get into subway stations.
“There were times that I was aggressively slapping my card on the card reader like a crazy person,” Qian said.
It would take up to 20 times to actually work, causing her to hold up lines and angering the feisty New Yorkers who were stuck behind her.
Seniors Mary Meacham and Susanna Payne went to summer camp together. Three out of five people in their cabin tested positive for COVID-19, so they ended up being roommates for an entire week while everyone else was quarantined.
Freshman Neko Mannes went to sleepaway camp in Crossville, TN where COVID-19 was raging. Two days before she went home, she started feeling a little sick but tested negative. Mannes then took another test when she got home, and it came back positive.
Instead of getting to see her friends, she was forced to quarantine for a week. Luckily, after that week, she was able to return to seeing her friends as usual and enjoy the rest of her summer.
Despite difficulties with credit cards and frustrating interactions with strangers, the Harpeth Hall honeybears had an overwhelmingly positive summer, going on fantastic vacations and having fun at summer camps, creating lots of wild and funny memories to look back on.
