Yes, this is an article about spring break. It may seem strange to be reading an article about spring break after the fact, but here it is, and please bear with me.

Hopefully, your spring break was enjoyable, whether it entailed a twenty hour car ride to a beach somewhere, a two hour ride to the mountains for some skiing or even the time it took from the couch to your fridge, if you didn’t go anywhere else. Hopefully, you were able to recharge some before this semester takes its usual crazy turn in mid-April, with tests, group projects, and papers galore.

Aside from the, uh, break, the best parts of spring break are the shake up in the routine that it brings and the spirit of adventure that seems to infect people in the week before the break. Even though the break is now officially history, there is no good reason that you can’t continue to shake up your routines.

If you’re used to staying in, force yourself to go out. If you’re used to going out, stay in, or perhaps visit new bars instead of the old haunts. Did you know that Fort Collins has a Pinball arcade? Well it does, so go play pinball. Hodi’s Half Note offers free comedy shows (If you’re over twenty-one, though it only costs five dollars if you’re underage), as does Krazy Karl’s Pizza. Go watch stand up, or better yet, go do stand up. Go for long drives up highway 287 or somewhere beyond Horsetooth reservoir. It doesn’t much matter what you do, as long as its a departure from the normal.

Aside from school and work, most of us are lucky enough to have plenty of free time on our hands, and the misuse of that free time at this point in our lives is nearly criminal. Fort Collins is so much bigger than it first seems, and the possibilities for filling that free time are boundless. All of this is to say that your sense of adventure does not only have to exist for one short week in March, or that you have to travel a long ways to tap into it.

Collegian Columnist Jesse Carey can be reached at letters@collegian.com or on Twitter @junotbend.