Welcome back from spring break. I’m sure many of you are still working off the hangover and/or remembering the good times spent on mission trips and with friends. Students generally take the holiday as a good time to rest, to reflect on the school year or perhaps to drink … a lot.

Indeed, this was my first spring break as a 21-year-old student — but instead of going to Florida or Colorado, I chose to go home. Luckily for me, many of my friends from high school also chose to return to our small Mississippi town as well and we made the best of it.

Thomas Wolfe said you can’t go home again, but I learned this last week that going home can be just as relaxing as a week at the beach — and much cheaper, too.

Before the holiday, my world as a student journalist involved dealing with Student Government elections, fee increase campaigns and the reality of schoolwork, which turned out to be a little overwhelming.

My friends asked me what I would do when I went home, why wouldn’t I go on vacation and drink my stress away. Well, despite my decidedly non-beach body, I had an engagement in my hometown which brought me back — and for the first time in a long time, I spent a whole break at home.

I don’t know what it is like where you grew up, but if you’re looking for a stereotypical Southern town, I grew up in it. I went back — and found that some things never change. Of course, the little things like high school field parties have turned into darts at a local bar and getting your friend with a fake ID to buy you a case of Natural Light has been replaced by a bartender and a large scope of drinks — all legal, of course. But in general, the thing that changes the most is you.

I spent the holiday drinking with old friends like we never left town. And I hope that despite how much time you spend here at the University, no matter how many people you meet or how many facebook friends you can claim, you can still go home and just live that dream before the real world kicks back in.

I’ve found people do crazy stuff when they’re drinking at home; I think you feel older and a little more invincible now that you don’t have curfews and high school to worry about. Take my friend Chase, who thought it would be funny to rent a hotel room and drink until the sun came up. He just wasn’t tired (although he was thirsty), and after a battle with a McDonald’s breakfast burrito, he pulled his car over a block from my house, leaned his seat back and slept into the afternoon.

Later that day, over yet another drink, I asked him why he didn’t come over and just sleep on my couch. He said his spring break wouldn’t have been the same — it’s the experience that matters.

People believe that cliché, that you can’t go home again. And an average person might wonder why Chase went home when he could have gone to the beach and worked on his tan. He had the money, he had the time and nothing else to do.

But if you know that someone or something like an old friend and a drink is waiting at home, it makes perfect sense.