On the Road Again...

I’ll admit it. I get bored on campus. And when boredom strikes, you can either get creative to have fun or, well, leave. And what better way to leave campus than via road trip? Off-campus is off-campus no matter how you slice it, and if you get to road trip to get there, then it’s just that much better.

I went home with one of my friends this weekend. Her classes were cancelled for Friday so she was leaving Thursday, and I was invited to come along. Consequently, all my Friday classes were, for all intents and purposes, cancelled as well. I do have a class Thursday night, so we decided to leave after that. Why? Driving five hours after a 6:15 class is better than getting up early to drive. I told my dad that logic and he didn’t grasp it. He’s not a college student and therefore doesn’t appreciate the fact that sleep is merely an option as much as I do.

I had burned a CD full of driving songs to listen to on our journey to off-campusness. I had everything from ‘Life is a Highway’ by Tom Cochrane to the ‘Da Da Da’ VW commercial song. And all of them had some vague reference to driving, no matter how distant. ‘End of the Road’ may have been a stretch, but it’s harder to fill up two whole CD’s than you might think. We borrowed a CD adapter, which was for some reason incompatible with the tape player. It kept flipping sides. Over and over again. Click. Click. Click. After some feeble attempts to remedy the situation, we resorted to the infallible fix-it: crank the volume so you can’t hear the problem.

An upside of this solution was that it forced us to sing louder to the music. No problems there. Volume is equivalent to talent as far as I am concerned, and if that is the case we are flying headfirst towards a Grammy. Celine Dion has nothing on us. Also, the louder music effectively drowned out the more-than-a-little discomforting growling noise that the engine was emitting. If you can’t hear it, it’s not there. Really.

When the clicking had finally worked us into synchronized facial tics, we went to the radio. My personal philosophy is that there’s ALWAYS something better on the radio, so I am a big fan of the scan button. A while of this told us that we were getting close to her house, mainly since we were getting three NPR stations, some country stations, and the most boy bands I’ve ever heard on a single station in my life. We sang along anyway. Practice makes perfect. Not to imply that we need it.

We got in at around 1:30 in the morning- the start of normal dorm nightlife. Nice. I swear, if this whole ‘higher education’ thing doesn’t work out for me, I’m going to trucker school. Life would be one giant road trip. And I can’t imagine a more- hey- do you hear that clicking?

3.2.2001