One of the main reasons I did Summer Camps originally was because I previously lived in the US as a child for roughly 3 years. And it was that age where a lot of my earliest memories from childhood come from (around that 6-9) age. Don’t get me wrong I do remember things from before I went to America my memory isn’t that awful, but my memories from the US are probably my most clearest.
And with that a lot of my friends I had when living in America are basically the oldest friends that I have today, so I really really wanted to “go back to my roots” so to speak and see my old house and catch up with my old friends. So instead of doing an outlandish trek around 13+ states like most people probably do I just hopped on a train from Charlotte to Philadelphia (I say hop – in fact it took about 14 hours) and went and stayed at my mates Pat house.And I hadn’t seen him in probably…. 5 years at this time?? He came over to the Uk on a football trip in around 02 or 03 I think, but when your younger time goes by a lot slower and 5 years was like over a quarter of my life at this point. So yeah it was a really long time in my eyes! And it was amazing, really great to catch up with him and his family as well who we were pretty close with as a family whilst living there.
I managed to go see all the old sights, good old King of Prussia mall which is the largest mall in America, (fuck off Minnesota it is bigger than Mall of America check Wikipedia!!!) I saw the old house and even checked out my old elementary school, which looked horrifically smaller then how I remembered (which seems to be the case when seeing things you haven’t seen since a child). I had a look around the old local shops near where I lived and shockingly my old cinema which I went to all the time had been knocked down!! Gutted!
So yeah it was all very nostalgic! I was then lucky that Pat’s girlfriend at the times father was on the medical staff at the Eagles so he managed to get some free tickets for us to go see a preseason game, which was pretty sick, I had never been to a game before and I still follow the Eagles so I was buzzing. There was a huge Thunderstorm during the first half so everyone began leaving so we managed to move down right to the front. And to top it off all the cheerleaders had unfortunately chose to wear white that day so I was pretty distracted a lot of the time :p Oh and I also managed to get a picture with the Mascot!!! Woo
It was quite an experience and afterwards I got my train to New York where I was going to spend a few days before flying home. I again chose to get a train and had to somehow work out where to meet my friend from camp Nick… but that’s a story for another Throwback Thursday….
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