What was your favorite car/road trip?
My most memorable road trip was going to the Vanier Cup in mumble mumble some year in the 1990s when the school’s football team got really good one year and went to the Canadian University Football Championship. Unlike your convoluted system of bowl winners and sacred votes by journalists, we Canadians prefer a one game winner take all system to find out who is the best at footbawl.
For several years, it was held at this new place called the SkyDome in Toronto. So we students were invited to go to a road trip down to Toronto… hahaha, good one school admins! That Saturday at 7am, we loaded up and then at 915am we stumbled drunkenly onto the bus armed with beers, jugs, bottles and various containers of alcoholic concoctions that were known to Queen’s students and headed on down the road to the Big Smoke.
Some of us thought being university students we rated a coach with a bathroom. Hahahaha, idiots. We got yellow school buses and it became a 2 and 1/2 hour drinking nightmare as there were no bathrooms.
Only one person even thought of bringing some kind of portable container. For the public health’s sake I won’t go into the gory details, but one poor guy ended up spilling the damn thing all over himself (not me, I swear!) and one moron emptied the bottle into the path of a car of seniors (oops… again not me.)
By the time we entered Toronto, the bus was full of quite drunk rowdy students except for one poor guy who passed out from hitting the Purple Jesus (grape drink mixed with cheap vodka) way too hard.
The game was a blur as Queen’s ended up beating the Sask Roughriders, er, Farmers, uh Huskies badly to win the Canadian National Champions.
One thing about Queen’s of that era was that we were pretty damn rowdy (and stupid) as we were also well known for storming our own field and destroying it after a tie game on Homecoming Weekend. Skydome had a lot of security for that reason… fat good that did them. After the final second, a tidal wave of Queen’s students and almuni stormed the field while I got intercepted by the one security guard who gave a shit and thrown in one excellent agile move by the huge linebacker sized security guard right back into the stands.
“Really? There’s 20000 (exaggeration) Queen’s students on the field!” I yelled.
He turned around to see the tidal wave of drunken fools and sighed. He waved me on.
The remaining night was spent trying to find a place to eat, wandering the streets back to the restaurant because some fucking idiot (me) left his backpack there. Finding an after hours club that served booze and watching another friend trip while carrying 12 beers and spilling all but two of them while the rest of us howled as his clumsiness.
The trip on our vomit, piss, booze smelling school bus wasn’t so bad except for the damn hangover.
So what was yours?
After one film I did, a friend and I took two weeks and hit the state parks in Utah, Colorado and ended up at the Grand Canyon. It was great. We hit most of the big ones – Bryce Canyon, Zion, Arches, Death Valley, etc. We were in my ‘86 Jeep Wrangler so not the most comfortable ride but it was great fun. My friend was British and could not get over how massive the US is.
ive never really road tripped….when i had a car it didnt seem like a thing needed doing (really…we just hotboxed them and stayed put)
and now that it seems like a thing needs doing….owning a car is too expensive
i did use to travel about with my bike tho….back when i road raced…staying with guest families whilst abroad
the one that most stands out was in the ardennes….i have never met a more decent carricature of a family in my life….. no swearing.. family tv time till 9….. they damn near tucked me in come 10
dont get me wrong..they were nice people….but wierd
anyways….come race day i made it about halfway before i slightly misjudged a corner and clipped a knee high wall which i went straight over….and into a graveyard 20 feet below
that was a big oof i somehow got away with with only a broken collarbone
eventually got back on the bike and limped it to the finish…..and got rewarded with a red lantern….i did not know there was a prize for last place….twas then i learnt….its better to not finish…than to finish last
i still have that lantern btw…its up in the attic
a reminder of my failure as a rider….
road racing is harsh
I don’t have any exciting car trip stories. I did go to an academic conference as a college junior that my university did the stupidest route possible to get us there.
College is in northeast Missouri, conference was in Asheville, NC.
We all stumbled to the bus at 4am to ride across the state to Kansas City. To then fly to Atlanta, to then fly to Greenville, SC. To then get into another bus and go the last leg over to Asheville. We got in late, like 10pm.
It would have been a 12 hour drive, we couldn’t figure out why the university sprung for flights for part of it.
When we got back, I was talking to a senior who had gone the previous year and I was bitching about how long the travel was with the flights. She laughed and said they took a bus the whole way there, and that we probably took flights because the bus driver had dozed off and driven them off the road.
We hermits do not road trip.
There are so many it’s hard to keep track, but this one stands out.
That moving story was a great read. Thanks for the flashback!
“The bungees aren’t doing anything. The hearse is bouncing like crazy” is a phrase I hope I never have to say ever.
Yeah it was…not fun.
I’ve road tripped from Montreal to Toronto and back countless times to visit family. One time, I was driving with a friend and on a whim we took the exit for a Big Cat Zoo. That sign had intrigued me my whole life but I never had time to make the detour. It ended up being a privately owned zoo which doubled as a tiger mill (they bread big cats for private ownership). The couple who ran the business was German, so I switched to speaking German and we were invited to play with baby tigers for free (usually they charged for this pleasure). Baby tigers are not soft and cuddly like I imagined. Their fur is very coarse. They are also loud and all claws. Who would have guessed that baby animals are as needy and dependent as human babies? Definitely not 20 year old me.
Traveling with my then-newish (West) German boyfriend in his car up into Belgium to visit his grandfather’s grave at a small German war cemetery.
[Long story redacted]
My favorite road trip is my next one.
I wrote about a memorable road trip on here once before. A group of my friends piled in a van and drove to New Hampshire for a wedding. We were rip roaring drunk the entire time. Some teens hit our van at a gas station in New York but we were too loaded to get a police report so we just had them give us all the cash they had and called it even. It was around $100. We saw a car with a couple of sisters that had tipped over avoiding a bear. It was high up in the Adirondacks, middle of the night, way before cell phones. They were more afraid of us than being alone on the road with bears. The guys managed to right their car so they could sit in it until morning and we sat in our van until daylight to make sure no more harm came to them, then continued on our merry way. Following the wedding we went up to Acadia for more drunken shenanigans and eventually made our way back to the Burgh. We had a fantastic time and not one fight among us for the entire trip.
Completely unrelated to road trips, dunno if folks are aware of the stupid social media thing where people intentionally make disgusting or horrible food intentionally and act like OMG it’s a big reveal and it’s so amazing and will taste so good.
It’s stupid in so many ways. Food waste, general grossness, also people are stupid and I’m sure some folks have tried it.
Case in point – one of my friends shared this tiktok or whatever of this “deep fried sandwich” and we’ve been talking about how gross it is. The video creator stacked layers of bologna lunchmeat with Kraft singles American cheese, wrapped it in pastry dough, battered it in pancake batter, coated it in crunched up ramen noodles, and then deep-fried it.
I agree that’s a ridiculous waste of food. I have to admit to being a little curious though.
Oh I am interested in most anything deep-fried, but this eldritch horror was an entire pack of Oscar Mayer bologna stacked with an entire pack of Kraft cheez slices. Like a 5 inch stack of heart disease in a deep fried mess.
I still remember going car camping as a little kid, maybe six, on the shores of Lake Huron, finding fossils and crying when it was time to go home. I have enjoyed other trips since then and been sad when they’ve ended, but never cried.
But the fictional trip I always admired was an imaginary one by Roy Blount Jr. from June 1989.
He wrote: