The PL-2 Retreat

This past weekend the second year residents packed their cars and headed to Sheboygan, WI (Affectionately known as Shevegas) for their annual retreat. The added benefit for the second and third year residents is that spouses and families get to come along. Our friends Tara and Andy decided to wait for Ari to finish work on Friday so that we could all drive up together. We packed their Santa Fe to the brim with all of our stuff: luggage, games, and libations. About halfway to Sheboygan there was a car pulled over on the side of the road and I immediately noticed that it was our classmates Jackie and Sarah. Andy pulled over and we all went to see what had happened. Jackie had a nasty flat tire. She had AAA on the way though so we helped by getting back on the road to let her know the nearest mile marker. We went to dinner at the Horse and Plow with almost all of my classmates and their spouses. It was tons of fun socializing with everyone outside the hospital while enjoying fried cheese curds... its a Wisconsin thing! Once we got checked into the resort, Andy, Tara, Ari, and I settled in with Scattergories. People popped in and out of our room to visit and try to get us to explore Shevegas with them, which we declined since we were saving ourselves for Saturday (Tara's birthday). During our game, Andy tried to pass off "kamel" as a farm animal and things never got more serious than that! As he always does with word games, Ari won by a landslide. The next morning we had breakfast and then a couple of lectures... no matter how relevant they were painful; our jobs just do not require sitting for long periods of time so most of us have no tolerance for it. When we were finally finished we headed into town for pizza. We had this awesome Italian style pizza to get our energy up before heading back to the resort's waterpark. Ari loves waterparks so I was so glad he was able to get the day off. We have actually been to a waterpark in the Dells that was bigger but this one did have some fast slides. After riding them quite a few times and enjoying a trip around the lazy river we went to dry off and warm up before dinner. Since it was Tara's birthday we decided to start the night early at the resort's wine and tapas bar. I had the best martini I have ever embibed called a mochatini... vanilla vodka, godiva liquer, and starbucks liquer... are you kidding me? Coffee and a martini! I was in heaven. We also split some baked brie which was also delicious and headed downstairs for cocktails and dinner. Dinner was tasty, the drinks were not so we headed back to the tapas bar after dinner. We took up an entire half of the restaurant. I had another mochatini before we all headed to Tara's room to celebrate her birthday and not being on call. The night quickly turned into a dance party thanks to someone bringing their iPod speakers and I picked out the tunes from my classmates iPod. Everyone had a great time... some more than others... until the party was broken up by security at about 2am. The next morning we had breakfast and it was pretty clear who had the most fun the night before. We packed up the Santa Fe and headed home. This time I drove so poor Andy and Tara could recover from their hangovers. We definitely had a great time!!