Buxeda says he enjoyed visiting his "fugitive" friend, but wishes he had been able to uncover his plans for the near future.

"He said he wants to come back to Harvard in the fall and finish up here, but he hasn't contacted anyone about returning," Buxeda says. "I think he said he doesn't have the money to come back right now."

With their mission accomplished, Buxeda and his two friends--tired of grandmother's house after a few days--decided to swing westward to New Orleans. Or, as they might call it, "Alligator Land."

"We ate a lot of alligator food, which I had never tasted before--even 'gator' burgers," Buxeda says. "It's pretty good--something like a cross between pork and chicken."

But while the trio was having fun tasting new foods and relaxing with some drinks at the well-known bar Pat O'Brien's, someone was making sure that their drive home wouldn't be so cheery.

"We got to our car ready to head back on a 30-hour drive to Boston--only to find that someone had smashed in one of the windows and stolen a few things," Buxeda said. "We tried to have a new window put in before heading back, but no one could install it on such short notice. So we took our chances and started off."

And, just as it always rains when you're without an umbrella, it always rains when your car has an open window frame that can't hide from a storm.

"We had to drive through a vicious thunder storm for four straight hours," Buxeda says. "We tried to improvise but gave up after having to stop 10 times when our [plastic bag taped to the window] kept peeling off. And I was afraid that we would get struck by lightning, but all that happened was that we got extremely wet."

But now, looking back at the week-long excursion, Buxeda says he couldn't have planned a more worthwhile vacation if he tried.

"I can't think of anything better than finding my long-lost roommate," he says.

The journey that never made it to the Sunshine State did acquaint its participants quite well with QUEENS.

On the final day of exam period last month, happy-go-lucky North House resident Henry B. Wilson '91 and his girlfriend spontaneously decided to withdraw a few hundred dollars from the bank and set out on a trip to Florida.

But somewhere along the way, their journey went awry. After one wrong turn that placed them in the unfamiliar hustle-bustle of downtown New York, the couple concluded that an all-night drive in the direction of Disney World wasn't for them.

"I had fallen asleep, and when I woke up the next thing I knew Henry was driving over the Washington Bridge into New York--at 5 p.m. on Friday afternoon during Memorial Day weekend," says Heather D. Hughes '93, Wilson's girlfriend, who lives in Kirkland House. "We were so lost in Queens that it cost us $10 in tolls just to get out of there."

But once they found their way out of the Big Apple, southerners Wilson and Hughes--who hail from Fort Smith, Ark. and Fort Worth, Tex., respectively--decided that they could have just as good a time exploring the Northeast as they could in the Southeast, without wasting four days of travel time.