In a couple of weeks, I'll be heading back to my favourite Road Trip destination, Niagara Falls. You can never outgrow road trips. The new adventures. The shitty motels. The mystery amount you have to pay in that city for bail from public intoxication. Of course, there are rules: 1) The driver makes the descision when to stop, not the passengers. 2) Any guests in your room must be approved by ALL friends (or the guy paying for the room) 3) If you must drink in the vehicle, cans only and NEVER bottles. There are more, but everyone has their own Focus: What is your favourite road trip (party, not vacation) destination? What does it have that makes it so special? Alt-Focus: What "rules" do you and your friends enforce when hitting the road?
I love road trips and have been on many good ones. Some of my most memorable experiences have come from trips where there was minimal planning on the destination, sometimes as little as a compass direction (e.g., "North!") Some of the experiences were only good in retrospect, such as the time we almost got killed by a guy who resembled a tattooed version of Harry Knowles in a giant black truck, or the time we accidentally wandered onto a military base during a "condition delta" (the gate was open and there was nobody there, we swear!) On the FOCUS, the Northeastern U.S. is my favorite place to road trip because it's denser, so there's less driving between waypoints and places to stop. Everywhere else, it can be hours and hours between anything interesting at all. Since this should be more than just a list of favorite destinations, let's add: ALTERNATE FOCUS: Tell your awesome road trip stories.
I'm a big fan of unplanned road trips. My most memorable one was driving to Chicago with some friends because we were bored and hungry on a Friday afternoon. Now I'm in Detroit so it's not a long ride by any road trip standard, but it was fun nonetheless. The conversation went something like this: Friend: I'm hungry Me: Let's get a pizza. Friend 2: Let's get a deep dish pizza. Me: Let's go to Chicago! One of my favorite things to do in a city is get lost. I just drive or walk around until I have no idea where I am and more times than not I'll find a really cool hole-in-the-wall place with amazing food and end up meeting some really cool people. As far as car rules, we didn't have anything official. My rules for road trips are the same as my basic rules for life: don't be a dick, stay flexible and adapt when necessary.
I'm going on a solo road trip in one week to go see my brother in Victoria. I figure I'll stop off in some small towns, see the sights and harass the locals. I figure I'll do it in one day but I'll likely get side tracked, which is what I'm looking forward too the most, I think. Pick up some hitchhikers, throw rocks at signs and hit some animals with my car; should be a good time. ALTERNATE FOCUS: My favorite road trip memory was the time that two of my friends and I went to the Shuswaps for a week with about six hours of planning. Our friend has a cabin on one of the smaller lakes and he mentioned that if we showed up, he would have room for a bunch of us. Three hours of sleep later, we were in my friends car and ripping it down to the lake. It's a long story of drugs, booze and loose women, so, I'll shorten it. - Arrived stoned out of our minds. Hopped on a speed boat after parking the car, ripped across the lake to his cabin and threw our stuff on the porch. Went and ripped around the lake for a bit and smoked a copious amount of ganga. - First night, found ourselves at a campfire with a bunch of cabin renters (there's a bunch of cabins on one side of the lake that are good to rent). Nothing much happened but witnessed a fight break out between two fourteen year olds; we got hammered. - Smoked hash one night and went for a four hour walk through the woods. Sung our asses off at the top of our lungs, found the lake and tripped out because of the lights dancing on the water from cabins across the lake. - Went to another campfire, in one of those steel dingies type boats (small outboard). Loaded too many people into the boat, got blasted at the camp fire. Friend made out with some underage chick and she gave him six hickies. On the way home, we drove our even more overloaded boat back to the house and ended up having to bail the boat out because water was pouring into it. - Spent the rest of the week driving around the lake with a bunch of gorgeous women from the rental huts; saw a lot of titties and women scampering around in thongs that week. -On the way home, heard about a beach party on the main lake. Went to see if we could get too it and managed to hitch a ride on a three story house boat. Paid a hundred bucks for the five of us (friend and his brother were with us) and drank an entire keg dry before we found the beach. Got ridiculously drunk and stoned at the party, ran into some friends randomly on the beach and partied on their houseboat. Woke up the next morning on a random house boat with about fifteen naked people (dudes and chicks), friends brother was still awake in the hot tub with two strippers and one of them was feeding his breast milk. All in all, it was a good week and we didn't plan it out one bit.
To me, road trips aren't about the destination, it's about the journey. I've probably driven 25k miles a year on back-road tours throughout BC and the Pacific Northwest. There are about 15 touring fanatics (all Porsche owners) that join me, and we make it our goal to find hidden, twisty, out-of-the-way roads to go and have fun on. We usually don't give a shit where we end up, as long as it's eventually back home with a shit-eating grin on our faces and stupidly high gas receipts.
This past (passed?) Spring Break I went with a high school/college friend to Vegas. We drove all the way from Alabama to Vegas, doing 4-5 hour shifts, stopping only for food and gas. The whole time my friend refused to put his blackberry down while driving, or let me (as the passenger) search for whatever we needed on our GPS. On the return trip we hit an ice storm passing through Denver and he refused to put his blackberry down even after skidding across the fucking road and completely losing control of the car. The only reason we didn't crash into the median barrier was because I grabbed the emergency brake. In the dead of the night in Kansas it got really bad with black ice patches all over the road, but we couldn't stop anywhere because of freaking March Madness and the Special Olympics (I think these are two separate events), we drove the entire length of Kansas at an average speed of 30 mph. I insisted on driving a double shift, "because I'd gotten used to the ice" just to keep him from being behind the wheel. I should probably turn the whole event into a short story. Got nothing better to do. But, my favorite drive ever was this July, going down to Montgomery for the Alabama bar exam. I got Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on iTunes and listened to the first half on the way down. Since I basically got a contact high from the book, ...and because I'm an enemy of Bill W., I decided I might as well be actually drunk on the drive back, so I got loaded at the hotel bar, and then listened to the rest of the book on the way home. FACT: Drinking makes I-65 into an 8 lane highway. Blind sight is 20-20-20-20.