Sneaky...

The plans have been in the works for a while - plans to celebrate our wonderful friend's birthday. Andrea is usually the one who plans our birthday celebrations so we figured we really needed to outdo her. We decided a surprise involving kidnapping would be best. So here was the plan and execution of it: Joanne and Cara blindfolded and kidnapped Andrea after her shift at the AMBS library on Friday afternoon. They drove her around to thoroughly confuse her (turns out they accidentally drove her all the way to Mishawaka) before bringing her right back to her house on campus. She had no idea that she was at her house until they took off the blindfold when she was in her kitchen. There she found the table set and one of her favorite meals prepared by Carrie and I - tortellini, garlic bread and caesar salad. For dessert we had frozen mint-chocolate ice cream cake, one of Carrie's specialties and Andrea's requests. During supper Andrea told us that she had suspected that we were up to something so she had tested Joanne earlier in the day to see if she had plans that evening. Joanne covered well, but Andrea - suspicious as she is - actually set out a suitcase for us! Carrie and I noticed it sitting on her bed when we got a chair from her room in preparation for supper. So Andrea was surprised that she had ended up back at her house. Little did she know that we planned to kidnap her a second time, this time to Camp Freidenswald for an overnighter. The plan was to surprise her with supper, then take her to go rent a movie (a diversion so her bag could be packed), settle in to watch the movie and then blindfold her a second time before taking off for the night. Though she had suspected a kidnapping I think she had resigned herself to a supper and evening in her own home as her birthday surprise. Everything was working out wonderfully until someone came to the door to pick up Andrea's housemate and he let it slip that we were going to Friedenswald. I can't even tell you how irritated all of us were at him! So the surprise was ruined but Joanne went and packed a bag for Andrea anyway and we all crammed into our car and headed up to Michigan. As students of AMBS we are offered one free night at Camp Friedenswald for personal retreats. I made arrangements for the 5 of us to have a retreat together so we took advantage of the free offer and got a cabin all to ourselves. All of us agreed that this was exactly the kind of retreat we needed. After a few runs down the tube run around midnight we had left our seminary cares behind. We presented Andrea with a "26 things we love about Andrea" collage, a birthday tradition among our group of friends, and talked into the wee hours of the morning. This morning we feasted on french toast and fruit. All of us were dragging a little coming back to campus, due in part to the lack of sleep but also because all of us were less than enthusiastic about coming back to homework. Here are a few pictures from our weekend adventure. Happy Birthday Andrea!