With the slightly nicer weather of the past few days (kind of, not really) the refreshing air seemed like a good enough excuse for a joy ride. And, of course, an opportunity to cross off #86 before it Ithacates all over campus again and seriously complicates driving and transportation. Carpe diem, as they say. 

I have walked across Ho Plaza hundreds of times. If you’re a current (or former) student at Cornell, I’m sure you have too. If your maturity level occasionally wavers between age-appropriate and pre-pubescent-boy, you might also get a kick out of the fact the plaza’s name is “Ho”. But that’s neither here nor there. I’ve also had my fair share of trudging up and down Libe Slope, less regularly than Ho, but still enough to know it’s a frequented route for students.

Regardless of the location-of-choice, #86 requires a fairly public display of completion. Given the lack of winter maintenance and remnant snow on Libe Slope, driving uphill on ice didn’t sound like that much fun (for my car, at least).  Furthermore, Ho Plaza is probably the more populated part of campus and if I’m going to subject myself to the possibility of arrest, I might as well go big or go home.

Late night seemed like a good time for the drive given that I was hoping to avoid sources of authority and cars that are supposed to be present on campus. Namely, campus police or the building/facilities maintenance trucks that sometimes drive across the Plaza. At the same time, rolling through campus during the really wee hours of the night might appear sketchy enough to encourage an overreacting studier to call campus police… and that would be less than ideal. My friend C needed a lift to her Mock Trial practice at 10 p.m., so we figured I may as well make one trip and include the Big-Red-Ambitioning en route to her practice. N wanted in on the adventure too, and I considered inviting others but was happy to keep the number of people in the car within the legal limit.

Our point-of-entry to Ho Plaza was somewhat of a debate. N suggested we enter by the parking lot behind McGraw Hall. I thought by Day Hall was best, as I have seen campus vehicles enter the plaza via the Day Hall parking lot. (Ultimately, I was driving … so Day Hall won). We drove from Collegetown to East Avenue and turned into the parking lot, only to keep driving straight onto the sidewalk along Olin Library. There were two students directly in front of us on the path, but they seemed in no rush to get out of the way. (Sidenote: if you two happen to be reading this … I don’t understand why you didn’t simply step onto the grass to get out of the way of a moving vehicle, but the truth is I was driving at 4 mph, so I suppose you didn’t need to anyway). We then turned left at the Clocktower and proceeded down Ho Plaza. We didn’t drive by any close friends as I was hoping, but there were enough people walking within the vicinity to give the casual “hello” and wave. Yes, we kinda felt cool. You would too.

The only glitch in our “plan” was that we didn’t really have an exit strategy. We approached the juncture of Ho Plaza, and the intersection of College Ave and Campus road. At this point, there wasn’t much of an option but to drive directly from Ho Plaza onto College Ave and pray my car didn’t bottom out on the curb. There were no pedestrians crossing the intersection, and no cars in sight so I went for it and safely re-entered on properly paved, car territory.

 The joy ride through Ho Plaza was a glorious success. It was obviously fun, and N, C, and I will not see any sort of blemishes on our J.A. record (I still haven’t #134. get J.A.’d for urinating on the Law School, though). Frankly, we should have and would have gone back for several rounds of plaza-touring, but C needed to get to practice, and I figured quitting while we were ahead wasn’t a bad idea anyway. My only regret is that we didn’t have an occasion-appropriate playlist to accompany our drive i.e. Tupac’s cliché “Rollin’ with My Homies” could have been a nice touch. Yes, an absurd soundtrack would’ve made us look (and sound) even more foolish … Hey, that’s what Big Red Ambitioning is all about.