First Track Meet: Vans, Disneyland, and Odometers

Wow. We did it. Our first track meet is over, and boy was it an adventure.

The van ride there was…very interesting. Coach Chase (We love you, Coach!) was terrified about driving the school vans, and the brake was making an awful screeching noise. Our van contained me, Mikka, Emily,  Luke, Isaiah, Quinn, Braylen, and Evan. The other van had all of the seventh-grade boys, and nobody knows where the seventh-grade girls were.

Someone couldn’t figure out how to close the door, so the side door was just open the whole time. He said it was a little bit cold.

We were in an exit-only lane, and we accidentally got off the freeway and almost went to Trader Joe’s. Everybody was dying laughing. I don’t even remember what we talked about, but it was the best twenty-minute van ride I had ever been on.

I want to give a shout out to Luke, who despite asking me not to write about him on my blog, was disappointed when I didn’t.

At the meet, everybody was worried about Luca, who was at an orthodontist appointment, but was expected to compete in 100-meter hurdles, which was the first event. Luckily, he arrived in plenty of time, and everything was fine. He actually won first place overall with a time of 17.99 seconds, which is great, I think!

Stella, one of the seventh graders, won first place for the 1600 with a time of 6:08.73. Go, Stella! She also was the anchor to both relays, and she did an amazing job keeping us on track.

I spent most of my time standing in line for long jump with Emily (not from Germany). It felt like Disneyland, but not quite as fun. Emily was good company though, and we had a lot more fun in that line than the boys did. I’m not really sure what they were doing to be honest.

The ride back to school was even more hilarious. It was me, Mikka, and Luke. Coach Chase was driving again, and he refused to let me get out of the van at my house despite the fact that we drove RIGHT BY IT, and my family was home. We got lost in some neighborhood and ended up driving in circles for a while. We stopped at the gas station, where we struggled to find the gas-filler-upper, if that’s a word. It seemingly disappeared, and poor Chase seemed to be having a crisis. It was hilarious. Mikka and I were singing, Chase was looking for the gas-filler-upper, and Luke was just inside the van pounding on the windows. There was a YouTube tutorial involved. Once we did find it, the struggles were not over.

“What is an odometer?!”

Chase was on the verge of a mental breakdown, and all of us were just like, we’re living at this gas station now. Good times. We called the other coaches, we tried to figure out how much gas was in the van while it was off, it was quite the adventure. Once we finally got back on the road, Chase remarked that driving the van wasn’t so scary anymore. We laughed and laughed and laughed.

Best day ever.

Update: I was informed by a few people that the “gas-filler-upper” is in fact called a gas cap. Sorry.