I Survived the Trailer/Quidditch Trip

It was actually a lot of fun! As part of the bribery/ early birthday present, my mom gave me a running outfit. I just happened to match the trailer then. Awesome. My parents picked me up and we drove to the campsite outside of Indianapolis.

We stayed at Riverbend Campground in Noblesville, which was old and a little strange, but hey, it was cheap and just eight miles from the quidditch games. We were right on the water and had plenty of room to set up a screen tent (which was challenging, mostly because we tried to assemble it inside out). The bathrooms were similar to every horror movie I've ever seen, so I resolved to only use the trailer shower.

In case you're wondering (I know I was), here's how the bathroom situation works. Imagine an airplane bathroom, except with a shower. And the whole bathroom is a shower. When it's time to take a shower, the entire bathroom is your shower stall. There's plenty of hot water, but not a ton of water pressure or space.

The trailer sleeps three. There's a queen-ish sized bed at the front of the trailer, a slideout kitchen with a fridge and two burners across from the bathroom and a table at the rear of the trailer. The table also folds down to a single bed. I brought my sleeping bag and hunkered down there.

The only thing about a trailer is that everything has to have a place to go, or else it looks messy. Hence this photo of me in my little nook. It wasn't really that unkempt, we were just moving things around before getting ready for bed.

Saturday morning, we had a little breakfast and then headed out to Conner Prairie, where the 2011 International Quidditch Association was holding the Midwest Cup. The competition included 18 colleges and my sister's school, Purdue, was hosting. That meant that my sister was running around and barely sleeping while organizing this whole ordeal. My parents and I found a shady spot and watched quidditch.

There's a lot of strategy in quidditch because there's essentially three games going on simultaneously; one is a basic scoring system where kids throw a white ball through a ring. The second is a dodgeball scenario where the players try to hit other players with a red-colored ball. The player that is hit has to drop everything and go touch the ring. The final game that's going on is catch: every university playing has to provide a snitch, which is a person dressed in yellow that can run around everywhere and do anything. Each team has one seeker and when the seeker removes the snitch's tail, the game ends and the team that caught the snitch gets 30 points. Therefore, if you're really far behind in scoring, you don't want to catch the snitch, but you do want to make sure the other team doesn't catch it, either.

My uncle lives in the area and met us out at the field. Eventually, we headed back to the campground and had some food my mom made in advance for dinner. She even made me my favorite, turkey chop suey! Yum, yum, yum.

My dad started a fire and I had the smores I was promised. We repeated the routine today, but we packed up the trailer and took it with us to the field, then left from there. I'm looking forward to sleeping in my queen-sized bed and showering in my full-sized shower.