When you get to college, you meet a wide variety of people from a wide variety of places. You get a bit more freedom and a bit more curiosity. In the last 4 years, some of the greatest memories I share with my friends have come from road trips, even if they haven't been particularly long ones. You can turn the most simple of activities into longstanding memories because you've got your favorite people around to share them with you. So, with Spring Break right around the corner, let me make a suggestion:
1. Who better to sing along to music and laugh with for a six hour drive than your best friends? You can tell a lot about a person by their iPod playlist selection.
2. No one will judge you when you take a wrong turn and have to turn around in the middle of the highway.
3. Those road games that you played when you were a kid become fun again. And it's still freakishly hard to find anything beginning with a W, X, Y, or Z.
4. When - not if - something goes wrong, it becomes an inside joke for years to come. Duck taping your window when the motor goes out stops sounding so bad after a while.
5. The journey is just as important as the destination - stop along the way. If you find yourself playing on ice and snow at the top of a volcano in New Mexico at 9am, it simply becomes part of the adventure.
6. Sometimes you wind up singing Broadway musicals for 8 hours, other times you don't even turn on the radio - being in the car for that long gives you a lot of options of how to actually get to know your friends even more.
7. You get to develop the perfect collection of 'road snacks'. Have to have a bit of sweet and salty.
8. There are some places where, let's face it, you just can't go with your family. Or at least, you probably shouldn't. Bourbon Street, for one.
9. It's always going to be two adventures in one. The journey matters as much as the destination, so why not make them both amazing?
10. After college, everyone goes their separate ways, starts jobs and/or families, and you start struggling to make all of the moments balance out. These four years, unfortunately, don't last forever. So get out there and explore while you can. It stops being this easy faster than you'd believe.
