Remember that time... in Italy... When the lights were out...

Get your mind out of the gutter. This isn’t THAT kind of story.

I told this flashback story to a coworker today and thought it would be a funny one to share on my blog. Always thinkin’ about you fellow bloggers!

Once upon a time (11 years ago), in a land far, far away (in Italy), there was a young girl. It was me actually!! I was 17 years old and on a Grade 12 Europe Trip with my school. There were 40 students on the trip and we went to France, Monaco and Italy. One of the most interesting and fun holidays ever!

This particular story took place at a hotel in Rome on the last night of the adventure. After dinner a group of us were hanging out in the hotel room (we may or may not have been drinking the 12 bottles of wine we purchased that day…) and we heard some noise outside the balcony of the room. We looked out and low and behold there was an Italian soccer team staying in the other tower of the hotel. Well... we being 17 year old girls of course started whistling and screaming for them. They hollered right back and tried to get us to open the door of our hotel tower to let them in (at the hotel you needed security cards/keys to get into each of the buildings). We knew the teachers on the trip were in the rooms next to us and we would get in SO MUCH trouble if we let them in so the crazy Italians started trying to climb up the balconies. After a while they started creeping us out so we closed the balconies and went about our own “last night in Europe party”.

For the entire trip I had been rooming with 2 other girls. They were exhausted and wanted to go to sleep but I was planning on pulling an all nighter with the rest of the group. The thing was you needed to put one of those security keys I mentioned into a slot in the room in order to get power to the room, the same key you needed for the halls and for the door to get in and out of the room too. Really smart plan for saving power, but not smart when we only had one key between the 3 of us. So my roomies and I decided that I would take the key since they were just going to sleep anyways and didn’t need lights.

Off I went down the hall to join the rest of the group, key in hand. At 3 am we heard banging and yelling from somewhere in the hotel. Those of us that were still up instantly thought it was the Italian soccer team so we were too scared to open the door to the hall to check. After a while someone said “I think that noise is coming from our floor??”, we opened the door and peeked out. “Umm… Mich… I think that noise is coming from YOUR room??”.

We ran down the hall to my room and opened the door. There were my roommates, soaking wet, in complete darkness. The pipe from the shower burst somehow and water was spraying everywhere. The poor girls were locked in the room with no lights and no way out.

It’s a funny story NOW but let me tell you… they were not happy having to pack all of their soaking wet clothes for our flight early that morning.