USD Magazine, Spring 2002

Jose Chavez (floppy hat) and Brad Alves pack up the ir truck with the essentials for their trip to Lake Havasu.

Padre Island, off the Texas coast.

This year, the students plan to play with children in an orphanage, visit a home for the elderly, serve food at a soup kitchen and build house in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods. "Ir's hard work, but we can handle it," Horejs says."You should see people just jumping right in, picking up shovels and getting to work. Ir's so fulfilling. I've found that the impact of serving others is much more long-lasting than any other more tradi– tional spring break trip I could have taken." Nevertheless, Palmer says because students will forever be drawn like magnets to seaside havens, the more traditional spring break vacations will always be in style. The most popular destinations, he says, have at least two key ingredients - warm weather and miles of sandy beaches. The No. 1 hot spot is Cancun, Mexico, followed by Jamaica, the Bahamas, Hawaii, Lake Havasu and South

"Spring break, as we

know it, has been around since the 1950s and '60s, when Frankie Avalon's movies pro- moted warm-weather beach ventures," Palmer says. "In the '70s and '80s domestic locations were popular. The desire to travel to places like Cancun and Mazatlan started in the mid-to-late '80s and blossomed in the '90s." Richie Yousko '87 calls his senior-year spring break one of the top 10 memories of his college days. The be-all, end-all destina– tion in his day was Mazatlan. Yousko and several of his buddies were able make it to all the parties by cleverly bringing along from home their own wrist bands in every color of the rainbow.

"We hooked up with a more economical, off-brand college tour group, made it down to Mexico on a fairly inexpensive flight, stayed in a motel where we at least hoped the sheets were changed every day and did our best to sneak into all the big, brand– name parties," says Yousko, a sporting goods store representative. 'The big thing was parasailing. Other than that, we spent our time pursuing different beaches, playing volleyball and hunting down the cheapest drinks. " Chris Gualtieri, who graduated in 1983, says his favorite spring break trip was during his sophomore year, when he and a gro up of friends from the biology cl ub ventured to San Felipe, Mexico, where they spent their time camping on the beach and collecting aquatic crabs and other sea life for research. "We played volleyball, swam, cooked fish right out of the ocean, made sushi for the first time and camped out under the stars," says Gualtieri, now a San Diego ophthalmol– ogist. "All the experiences were new. And when we all get together for Homecoming or other campus events, it's still a topic of discussion even 20 years later. " Gualtieri says he's amazed at the party atmosphere surrounding spring break today, which he and others blame on the hype creat– ed by MTV and its week of programming

"The most important thing is to have a great • experience. You just want to come back and have a great story to tell."

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USO MAGAZINE