Two weeks ago, my college hosted an Enrolled Student’s Day in order to give the new incoming class of 2020 one last chance to tour the campus and receive answers to any burning questions before move-in day comes at the end of August. This was an event my family decided that we could not miss, as my mother wanted to have a better picture of the campus so when that day finally comes it can go as smoothly as possible. However there was only one major problem with this plan; my college is nine hours away from my home and my graduation was the day after Enrolled Student’s Day. So we had to hightail it home right after the event was over and since we had come into Virginia the night before, this meant in the span of two days we spent 18 hours in the car! My mother and grandmother, who had tagged along at my grandfather’s insistence, were the ones who were driving, leaving me in the backseat to occupy myself until we got to the school. This normally wouldn’t have been a problem as I could’ve easily just spent my time phone, but during this trip, I became so carsick that I couldn’t even look at the screen without my head spinning. So I had to find other ways to keep me entertained during this long road trip and these were some of the rather odd ones that I had come up with....

1. Count The Crosses

I’m going to be perfectly honest here, I am not a religious person in the slightest. My personal beliefs tend to jump around from atheist to agnostic, and I don’t identify with the Torah, Quran, Bible, or any other religious text. I’m very open about this too, as it is my beliefs and I have the religious -well lack thereof- freedom to say that I don’t pray. So some of my friends and family have said that they have no idea what I was thinking when I chose to go to the college in the middle of the bible belt.

I guess I didn’t realize just how religious the area was going to be, until we crossed into Virginia and I was greeted with a humungous white cross on the side of the road, marking the first of many churches we would pass. After a certain point of seeing one practically every few miles , I started to keep track of just how many churches/sets of crosses I saw along the highway and in the Roanoke area. This “game” killed two birds with one stone as it kept me occupied and I also questioned everything that had brought me to this point!

2. The Alphabet Game

This one is a classic, and I will warn you after you’re about five years old it’s rather dull. However it kept me occupied, so it’s worth mentioning. Instead of just looking for letters anywhere, I made it a bit more challenging by only allowing myself to find them in certain places. For example, one round was only for searching on the sides of commercial trucks, another was only the green signs dotting the highway, and the last was for looking at the license plates of only passenger cars. I only suggest doing this if you’re five minutes away from dying of boredom.

3. Let’s Worry About…

This one’s for all my fellow over-thinkers out there! Anyone who knows me knows that I worry endlessly about little things. It’s just who I am, and most of the time I can keep it somewhat under control by occupying my mind with other things. However all bets are off when I have nothing, but my own thoughts for eighteen hours. On the way down to Virginia, I worried about how Enrolled Student’s Day was going to go, and on the way back I was scared I wasn’t going to make it back in time for graduation. Every possible situation ran through my mind, from the good to the bad, and at some points, it was rather entertaining. My personal favorite? I imagined what I would say if the valedictorian actually handed over her speech time to me like she had joked about before school was over. I thought I would repurpose the lyrics to my favorite song, “Gibberish” by MAX, to call out my school on their failures and shortcomings. I even figured out a way to sneak the rap in!

4. Imagine If…

I’m a writer and inspiration comes to my kind in the weirdest ways. For the most part, I source my stories from my dreams as well as twist my life experiences to answer the unanswerable questions. Sometimes, however, I just come up with things on the spot. This was the case as we passed some rather odd looking vehicles and passengers. I wondered why they appeared this way, and I made up life stories for them, with my own little twist. Instead of being realistic and saying “They were born in Indiana and then moved to blah blah blah;” they were placed into the dystopian worlds I had built and their life stories were built through that. For example, according to my imagination, one rather reckless driver in a red pickup truck that was most likely drunk, was instead a survivor of an underground fighting ring where he was stripped of any sort of identity, even his memories were taken from him. After escaping this hell, he couldn’t adjust to society’s rules and he would often go do somewhat dangerous things to just feel normal again, but he never went too far as that would draw unnecessary attention to himself. Little stories like this took up huge blocks of my time and also helped me to make my worlds more realistic by putting real people in them, rather than little figments of my imagination.

5. Being Social

By this, I don’t mean disappearing into my phone or tablet like what the meaning of “social” as become. Instead at many different points in the road trip, I had in-depth conversations with both my mother and grandmother, something that normally doesn’t happen because we’re always on the go and we never have the time to just sit down and talk. It was rather insightful, and I had learned a few more helpful tips for college than what I had had previously. Plus it was also rather relaxing to just open up to the two older generations of my family, and it made me kind of sad that this trip was supposed to be the beginning of leaving them for good.

These were some of the unconventional ways I kept myself occupied during the eighteen hour trip from New York to Virginia and back again, even with my awful headache from car sickness. So maybe next time, it might be wise to invest in possibly flying instead.