By Heidi Kurpiela

“When I was in Key West I was peed on in the hotel lobby,” says Buffalo State College student Melissa Williams.

There must be more to the story than that!

“Not really,” she says. “My mom told me guys do that sometimes when they’re drunk—they just get up and pee anywhere.”

And there you have it. Get ready; the spring break release is here. The unleashing of the students is soon. I rounded up a few and asked them to share their agendas and their tales, and reveal a few of my own.

Before the wild week begins

I can hardly sleep the week before spring break!

I make packing lists, I try on wrinkly summer clothes, I make more lists, and I buy new summer clothes, scratch out old lists and parade around my house in flip-flops.

My friend Mavis “saves himself” for spring break by not smoking pot for three months before he leaves. He waits until the perfect time, around noon the first day of his vacation, and slips away for a few hours, toasted in the sun.

My friends Nina and Rose are tanners. Look for them a week before spring break, they’re easy to spot—clay-faced and raccoon-eyed from tanning bed goggles. They say they’re tanning so they don’t burn when they get to their southern destination, when really they’re just tanning because it looks sexy.

Buffalo State junior Melissa Shaw, who’s heading to Hilton Head, S.C., is working out in the school gym.

She says, “I have to wear a bathing suit in a week, so yeah, I’m working out!”

A table of students by the women’s locker room joke about spring break fitness; says one girl, “If you want a flat stomach now, you better hurry, or get liposuction.”

Alyssa Brosius plays for Buffalo State’s softball team and she’s been training in the gym every day for their scrimmage in Fort Myers, Fla.

Chris Watroba, who’s coming along on my trip to Myrtle Beach, S.C., says he’s sleeping more, hoping to save those extra hours for reserve next week.

Tricia Morreale, who’s going to South Beach, Fla., with her boyfriend says she’s trying to get all her schoolwork done before the trip.

Then there’s Dawn Norman and Kiesha Buckingham, who are driving to Daytona, Fla., with 18 other friends. (Get out of town, I tell ’em. I thought I was the only one traveling in a horde of 20!)

“We’re stressing, cuz we’ve been slacking! We just figured out Sunday that we’re gonna go,” says Norman.

The girls say they planned their trip to Virginia last year in a few days, but they never had so many people who wanted to go before.

“I’m gonna bring an air mattress cuz I know its gonna be two-to-a-bed,” says Buckingham.

Besides beer & besides clubbing …

My friend Jenn was watching Comedy Central’s “Insomniac” with Dave Attell the other night when she called me up excited about an “Alligator Farm” that’s open all night in Myrtle Beach. I asked her, can you could pet the alligators … can you wrestle the alligators … what exactly can you do at an alligator farm? She never gave me a straight answer. I hope we’re wrestling them.

Shaw says she and her boyfriend are stopping in Raleigh, N.C., to see the French circus—“Cirque du Soleil.”

And not everyone goes south. Kim Radcliffe is going to Toronto and Nicole Vanhoesen is going to New York City, both are going with friends to see some plays.

For the most part the students I spoke to had only one stop in mind—as Morreale puts it—“the beach every day.”

As I struggled in the swirling snow, with a frozen hand, and blowing paper, writing all these comments down, I thought, she’s so right, the beach every day sounds perfect.

Besides, says Shaw. “This has been a really bad semester. We need to get away, before we kill each other.”

Best-kept stories, best-kept secret

My friend Sam says I take so many photos during spring break, that if you were to flip through them fast enough, you’d get moving animation of our entire trip. How else are you supposed to remember every hilarious thing that happens?

For example: when the toilet clogged one night and Andi plunged it with a pizza box. Or when Aaron and Paul chased a pigeon into our hotel room and trapped it in the bathroom so it would scare Elissa when she opened the door. Or the night Sarah was fondled at a foam-club and spit in the vulgar guy’s face. Or how about the time Mavis yelled from our balcony that there was a condom in the hot tub below so we would have it all to ourselves.

I’ve got pictures to document this all. One day I’ll be a mom, whose children might take off for five days of chaos too. I’ll need to prepare them.

But Buffalo State student Skeeter Jones says it’s best to keep these things to yourself. He says, “What happens on spring break, stays in spring break.”