The Troublesome Trio strikes again.

FINALLY. I have been waiting for a shenanigan-filled day worthy enough to post a shenanigan blog post about it. I should have known all I had to do was plan a Troublesome Trio day.

First, I should give you a little background on "The Troublesome Trio."
Rewind to July 28th, 2009. I'm on a bus heading to the Upper Peninsula to bike 200 miles and serve the less fortunate and camp on the property of a rad elderly couple. I was sitting next to my buddy, John, because so far he was my only friend going on the trip. When we got to the property where we were going to be staying, we immediately set up camp. I'm not exactly sure how it happened... actually I'm pretty sure everyone else on the bus had already pegged who they were going to tent with, and so I was one of the three "leftovers" that got thrown into The Ugly Dumpling together ("The Ugly Dumpling" was the name we gave our tent... it was truly the only fitting name. However, it literally blew away four days later in a storm since no one told us to stake it down... we still have plans to write a book titled, "Camping Failure 101"). The other two rejects name's were Brooke and Reina.
We were all a part of separate cliques back at Church and had hardly ever interacted. They thought I was mean, I thought Brooke was just a dumb blond, and Reina was just plain weird. Well, those things are all still true, but we have learned to appreciate each other for them now.
Anyway, that first night we stayed up until 4am sharing our life stories and dark secrets. Since that's what you usually do on the first night of being trapped in a tent with two complete strangers, you know.
For the remainder of the trip, starting that next morning, the three of us were constantly in the wrong place at the wrong time. Seriously, I could write the longest post ever about that trip and all the "incidents" that we were involved in together, but those are not the stories I'm trying to tell right now. The point is, we were labeled as "The Troublesome Trio" about halfway into the trip, and that name has stuck and is still relevant two years later.


About a month ago, Reina and I were suffering from some massive food babies and feeling a liiiittle insecure. We started joking about working out together, and Reina said that her mom actually has two passes for a free month of working out at this little gym in Plainwell called "Repz." But we were both busy last month and didn't want to start our free month when we couldn't get the maximum amount of use for them, of course. So we were like, "Let's start on April 1st because then it will be April fools day and it will be hilarious because the idea of the two of us working out is just a joke anyway."

So, it's been our plan for the last month to "work out" on April fools day. Last night we were talking about it and decided we should bring a video camera and document our "working out," since it would surely be so pathetic that we would want to be able to look back and laugh about it years down the road. We also definitely needed a tripod to set the camera on while we were "running."

Click HERE (if you're my facebook friend, which you probably are) to see Reina and I pumping ourselves up for the big day.

A wrench was thrown into our plan when we found out her mom had the camera over at Western, where she works. Being the flexible people that we are, we decided to go there and get the camera from her and then just use the rec center at WMU instead of Repz... even though the whole point from the beginning was using our free passes at Repz... but oh well.
The next thing we needed was a tripod. We knew there was one kept in our youth room's storage room at church, and we had to go that direction to pick up Brooke anyway.

We arrived at our church (another place at which I could go on and on about all the adventures we've experienced) and trotted gleefully to The Venue. But imagine our dismay when we found the storage room locked. However, we were not so dismayed that we saw this as an obstacle. We searched the rest of the church for another tripod, yet came up empty handed. We asked the few workers that were present (one) if they had a key, and she did not. We NEEDED a tripod. A month of planning hinged on us having a tripod. And yet there we were, staring at the locked door that separated us from the only tripod in the whole church with no feasible way inside. You'd think this might thwart our plan.
You'd think wrong.
Nothing stands between The Devious Duo (another story that would require its own post) and their goal. Nothing.

A memory suddenly popped into my head inside of a glowing light bulb that radiated hope. Last summer, some middle school primate boy had somehow managed to break the key off in the lock of this storage room, thus making the entry via door impossible. One of the custodial guys cut a small hole in the front of the stage (the storage room is behind the stage) and somehow army crawled his way through a maze of dust and death to get underneath the storage room, cut a square in the floor, and then pop through and unlock the storage room door from the inside. It had taken him at least an hour and a lot of voices to help him know where he was under the stage in relevance to the storage room.

Here is a map of the general layout:

Realizing that this was the only way to reach our tripod and thus move on with our day, we got to work moving the portable stage pieces so as to reach the rabbit-hole-sized entrance.
Once we could see our entry, I squeezed in first with the flashlight. Once under, we realized this would be slightly more difficult than we'd anticipated. It was basically a mine shaft. For one thing, we could hardly manage an army crawl on our elbows without hitting our head. For another, once inside, we already faced another wall. There were a couple gaps leading to the next stretch of space, but the question was, which gap to take? I remember them saying back in the summer that getting to the trap door all the way at the back required taking a very precise, indirect pathway. It was a complete maze. Also, every time I inhaled, I'm pretty sure my lungs filled with a lot more dust than oxygen.

Here's a map of the general layout beneath the stage/backstage/storage room:

As you can see, this little endeavor proved to be quite challenging. After about twenty minutes of crawling around in dirt and wires, I turned a corner and laid eyes on a colorful mass at the end of an exceptionally narrow tunnel. We pushed our way to the end where a jungle of bright wires rested, attached to some sort of motherboard system. And directly above it was the trap door - our goal. At first we tried to dodge the wires, but it proved impossible. We ended up laying on our backs, our heads at the massive outlet system, pushing up on the trap door which was inconveniently covered in those tiny but abnormally sharp nails.

And then finally... after shedding blood, sweat, and tears, we burst through the floor of the storage room in a frenzy of glorious victory. I felt like one of the 33 miners in Chile feeling fresh air for the first time in months. I can't remember the last time I was that filled with joy.
(We didn't really shed tears.)

Unfortunately, we both got these weird rashes on our legs from scraping along the concrete floor or something. But it was all worth it when we laid eyes on that tripod.

We left the church, prize in hand, and headed to go pick up Brooke for the remainder of our adventurous day.

I could tell you all about the rest of the day in lots of colorful adjectives and exciting verbs, but this is already getting sort of long, so I will just let you watch it for yourselves.

(Seriously, watch it... this post is nothing if you don't watch it to the end.)


The only thing left out of the video is the part where Reina ran a red light after leaving WMU with a cop passing right in front of us. He turned around after her and we pulled into the first parking lot to hide. Coincidentally, the parking lot ended up being under construction and was full of "Do Not Enter" signs. You'd think that hiding from a cop in an illegal area after just breaking the law would back fire, but fortunately the construction tools concealed us perfectly and we made it away ticket-less.

Oh, and we never did end up using the tripod.