While many of my high school classmates quickly forgot their junior year spring break vacation, having spent it in Cancun engaging in wild, drunken orgies, my week-long break proved an experience that I could not soon forget.

Rather than a typical beach vacation with friends, I spent my spring break traveling the Northeast with my father, making the grand tour of several colleges in preparation for what I assumed would be the woefully horrific experience of applying to a multitude of colleges and — gasp — having to choose between them to make the all-important, life-changing, can't-take-it-back decision of where to attend college.

My father and I had planned our itinerary out for months: we knew where we would go, how we would get there and how long we would stay. We planned for four colleges in five days, waking up early from one college visit only to begin the drive to the next. I assumed the vacation would be relatively uninteresting, harboring jealous thoughts of locations more exotic than New Haven, Conn. Thankfully, I was wrong.

My father and I spent virtually every minute together. We took the tours with over eager tour guides, listened patiently to the inane questions of psychotic parents in information sessions, ate in school dining halls to get the authentic college experience, and dissected the mountains of brochures and pamphlets meant to hook any prospective college student with a pair of working eyes into the charms of whatever college logo dominated the front page.

At night, savoring bites of hotel restaurant cuisine easily better than dining hall unmentionables, we mulled over politics and our perceptions of that day's college visit: Were the people too cold? What did you think of our tour guide? What is their football team like? Do they even have a football team? We watched the Notre Dame womens basketball team clinch easy opening-round victories in their national-championship winning season from the confines of our hotel room. We braved long car drives in the snow, armed with only a map and vague directions from the Internet that always proved incorrect. We took long walks along campus greens, watching students breeze past, backpacks laden with books. Most of all, we talked.

I would not have traded this experience, and yet I find that many do. An article in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal featured tour companies that hustle busy juniors at breakneck speed through prestigious colleges during their spring break. Many of these companies refuse to accept parents. They want to provide the authentic experience, to be able to tell students what a campus is "really" like, without the need to censure comments or pretend that drinking doesn't exist so that Sally's mother will let her attend. Perhaps the prospective student will learn valuable information about a college this way. I only shudder to think what he will miss learning from, and about, a parent.

• The college tour