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By
Jamie Willhelm
Harlaxton College Web Design Student
Thursday, February 28, 2008
After a dip in a cold ocean in February, a nice, hot shower sounds good, right?
Gary Cure, a student at Harlaxton College, thought so, on the college's trip to North Wales the weekend of Feb. 15-17.
Cure, 21, Indianapolis, and some friends went swimming in the ocean on the first night in the seaside town of Llandudno, North Wales. On the last night of the trip, he decided he wanted to go in the ocean one more time.
That one more time turned out to be a fateful decision for Cure, he said. "Since I knew the (ocean) water was going to be freezing, I turned on the shower (in his room) ahead of time, so that way, as soon as I jumped into the sea, I could jump right into the shower and be warm."
At his dorm back at the University of Evansville, Cure said, he had to leave the shower on for quite a while in order to get hot water. He assumed that the hot water would be the same at the hotel.
So with the shower "warming up" in his hotel room, Cure and a few friends went down to the beach and swam for a few minutes. They were planning to come directly back to their rooms. On the way back, however, they struck up a conversation with some British women standing outside a hotel on the way to their own hotel. The Harlaxton students decided to go have a few drinks with the ladies, and Cure forgot he'd left the shower running.
At the same time that Cure and his friends were having drinks in the next hotel down the street, Jake McKain, 20, Evansville, Ind., was in the hotel room next to Cure's. He said that he thought he heard someone knocking on his door. The knocking was actually on Cure's door, but there was no one in that room. McKain went out into the hall and informed the hotel personnel in the hallway that no one was in Cure's room. The hotel staffer went and got the master key to the rooms and let himself in.
McKain described what he saw in Cure's room as a scene from the movie "Home Alone."
"It looked like that part when the water was pouring down the stairs," he said. "It was like a constant stream coming towards the bed."
The hotel staff called Bronwyn Rout, the associate dean of students, who was on the trip as well. She went and found Cure in the hotel where he had gone after his swim and brought him back to their hotel. She was not very happy.
Cure later found out that the water from his shower had dripped down into the restaurant below, where hotel management had placed buckets to catch the water. There also apparently had been water dripping into the hotel manager's room, Cure said.
Although Cure had been drinking, he doesn't believe that was the reason for the shower overflow, he said. It had more to do with the fact that he and his friends got sidetracked talking to the British women and forgot about the shower he'd left on.
"It was not the smartest thing that a person could do," Rout later said of the incident, "but we all make silly mistakes and stupid decisions." When asked if Cure would have to pay for the damages, he caused, Rout said, "He may be lucky, we haven't heard anything (from the hotel) yet."
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These buckets in the restaurant of the hotel were used to catch running water from Gary Cure's shower.