Clawing through a sea of bubbles as techno music blasted through the air, advertising senior Sheila Orosey searched desperately for her broken sandal at a Disco Beach foam party in Acapulco, Mexico, last year.
"It's just foam everywhere, and you can't see," Orosey said. "I broke my sandal, couldn't find it in the foam (and) I got stepped on."
Orosey's misadventure joins some storybook of spring break mishaps Spartans find themselves in every year.
With thousands of MSU students hitting the road every spring, there's no dearth of spring break horror stories.
For Corianne Oakley, a biological science-interdepartmental freshman, spring break in California took a turn for the worse when her brother became ill.
"My brother had to take antibiotics, which caused a lot of gas," Oakley said. "He woke us up at night with his sounds in the bathroom."
Oakley's troubles weren't limited to the nighttime. Riding with her brother in a rental car during the day posed severe problems.
"We had to keep the windows all the way down," Oakley said.
On a spring break trip last year to Mexico, marketing junior Nowell Dutton recalls a predicament his friend got into at the hotel where they stayed.
"My friend got pushed into the door, and the hinge broke on the door," Dutton said. "The (hotel) security guards took him downstairs."
As Dutton said, the guards took the young man into a room and demanded $300 for the damages.
When Dutton's friend refused, they cut a deal — his friend gave the guards $50 and a pair of Abercrombie & Fitch shorts.
For some students, troubles arise when they come into contact with the locals.
Communication freshman Caitlin Cummer and her friend Chrissy Franco, a student at the University of Michigan, had a "creepy" spring break interaction last year with a man in Chuburna, Mexico.
"We were laying out at a very secluded beach," Cummer said. "A white Hummer drove up with a man holding up a beer out the window while driving."
Cummer said the man with a mustache man shouted from the car, "You guys want to take a tour of the town?"
After quickly declining the offer, the man drove off — much to the relief of the two women.
Franco highlighted a different moment of their vacation.
She said when the women were driving along the highway, Franco felt a strong urge to urinate.
With no rest area in sight, they pulled the car over.
"I had to go pee on a rock on the side of the road," Franco said. "I really had to go."
When it comes to advice for students embarking on spring break, psychology Professor Deborah Kashy said, "Ask yourself the question, 'Would I be doing this in my normal day-to-day life, and if not, should I be doing it now?'"
