Last week our family managed to take a three-day getaway during Gwinnett County Public Schools’ official spring break.

We spent the rain-soaked time relaxing in a cabin in Highlands, N.C., where we escaped during the pandemic in 2021. This year we ate in restaurants, shopped in downtown Highlands and nearby Cashiers, grilled out, played games, watched movies, read and generally relaxed. It was a decidedly family friendly mini-vacation bearing no resemblance to the stereotypical college spring break of lore.

Part of that lore was a travel piece I wrote for The Macon Telegraph way back in 1996 when I was a cub reporter. It was the height of the college spring break phenomenon at Panama City Beach, Florida, and MTV was broadcasting shows live from PCB during the college spring break season in March and early April.

My story for The Telegraph was part travelog, part service journalism. It was meant to appeal to those considering going on spring break to Panama City Beach as well as inform those who would never go but wanted to know what it was like. It appeared in the special Monday feature section I was coordinating for Generation X readers named “Tel X.” The audience for the Tel X section was young adults who were abandoning newspaper readership in droves. The enterprise attempted to provide content twentysomethings might find compelling and useful. Spoiler alert: Tel X did not reverse that trend. It lasted about a year.

I don’t remember how I got the idea but it was an eye-opening and exhausting experience. It had mostly faded in my memory until I recently found the story in my basement archives of old Tel X sections and Macon Telegraph story clips. Rereading the piece invoked a few chuckles and some winces.

The executive summary of the story is that college students went to Panama City Beach to party.

The details of the story revealed that the “party” was not nearly as glamorous in real life as it was on MTV.

Upon checking into the hotel I had been directed to by a newspaper colleague at The Panama City News Herald, I immediately found six guys from Georgia Southern who allowed me to join their group for the weekend. They gave me permission to use their names and print exactly what I saw.

“Dude! This is awesome! It’s like ‘Real World’ but for the newspaper. We’re going to be famous!” one of them enthused.

(For those who may not remember, “The Real World” was one of the first reality shows on television appearing on MTV with the opening lines, “This is the true story of seven strangers picked to live in a house, work together and have their lives taped — to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real.”)

There’s famous and then there’s Macon Telegraph Monday Tel X edition famous. So, yeah, not that famous. I’m sure their parents read the piece with great interest.

I will refrain from reprinting the entire story here, but I will give you the opening graph to set the scene: 

“Tel X coordinator Lance Wallace spent the weekend on spring break at Panama City Beach to see what happens when young adults from across the country gather to cut loose. PANAMA CITY BEACH – A white shoe polish sign on a Honda hatchback from Georgia sums up the spring break attitude… “Spring Break: Get tan, get drunk, get laid, but not necessarily in that order.” For college students, spring break presents an opportunity and excuse to vent all of their anxieties and frustrations.”

The story included timed dispatches like this: “Friday, 5:42 p.m. Donald Hansil and Stephen Clark pile into the hotel elevator, each clutching a Natural Light and an empty ice chest. They’re in search of an ice machine that hasn’t already been plundered… After scouring the entire hotel for ice, it was 15 feet from their room.”

Other highlights included beach volleyball matches, a bikini contest at Club La Vela, dinner at Hooters, being summoned to the stage by a female rap artist and miraculously incurring no additional damage charges for their room upon checkout. They had crammed 12 people in a room for eight to keep their costs down. For the record, I did not stay in their room, and I left them each night about 2:30 a.m. Even at 25, I could not keep up.

I have never been a partier. My visitation to that scene was like an anthropologist conducting research in a remote jungle village. It gave me enough distance to be objective, and I was not tempted to join in. I merely observed and captured such moments as this: “The group is beginning to look haggard. Steve explains how difficult the room situation has become. Jeff says as long as everyone’s drinking, people get along. Shower time is especially complicated  – 12 people, one shower.”

As I drove away from Panama City Beach on that Monday morning in mid-March 1996, I resolved that if I ever had offspring and they ever asked to go to Panama City Beach with their college buddies for spring break, I would advise against it.

So far that’s one parenting resolution I’ve managed to stick to.

What are your memorable spring break experiences? Maybe you don’t want to put it out for the internet, but if you are willing to risk it, leave a comment below and join the conversation.