Maine 2006

Yes, you are reading that correctly: Maine. This trip was probably one of my favorite trips that Darrell and I have ever taken, mostly for the shock value of the whole thing. Because really, who expects two college students in Iowa to drive to Maine for the weekend? It was awesome. And definitely a good relationship-tester; we'd only been dating for five months at the time of the trip. There's nothing like a 44-hour road trip to help you find out if your relationship has lasting power.

A little back story on how this whole trip came about. Somewhere around spring mid-terms (of my sophomore year and Darrell's senior) we were sitting around with some other people in our dorm complaining about school and tests and work and everything else. Someone made the passing comment that we should just go to Maine, because doesn't it seem like life would be so much better and stress-free there? Plus fresh lobster just sounded delicious. It became an on-going joke for a week or so, and then after one particularly stressful day Darrell came into my room and said "That's it. I'm done. Let's just go to Maine." My response? "Okay". So we left.

Old Orchard Beach, Maine

About twenty minutes down the road we realized the futility of our plan. We hadn't even packed anything, and both of us were supposed to work at least two shifts in the next few days. But as we turned to head back to school, we made the decision that we would go--and not tell anyone. After checking our calendars, we found out that with a little rearranging we could both be free the following weekend. We planned a route, made hotel reservations, and set a departure time. And on the following Thursday around five pm we were off, with not even our roommates aware that we were heading to Maine (Darrell's roommate thought the trip was totally awesome; my roommate was livid. Still not sure why though....)

We couldn't get over how perfect this slogan fit in with the purpose of our trip

Part of the other impetus behind this trip was a completely random goal of mine to visit all fifty states. So our trip didn't just include driving to Maine and back; we actually spent all day Saturday looping around back roads and driving through as many New England states as we could manage. In fact, I think we were only in the actual state of Maine for about eighteen hours, and at least ten of those hours were spent sleeping (we had driven all through the night on Thursday night).

We may or may not have driven in and out of Rhode Island two or three times just to make sure we got a good picture of the sign

This is a shot of Boston--through the back window. Unbeknownst to us, the interstate we were on actually went under the entire city. While it was certainly the fastest and easiest route, it would have been cool to drive through Boston. Guess we'll just have to go again sometime

As fun as it is to relive this awesome trip (and dream about doing something like this again....), I do have some practical things to share about this trip. Namely, some useful pieces of advice to help you survive a road trip. Because I realize that for many people road trips are arduous tasks, not something to look forward. Obviously the most important piece of advice I can give is make sure you enjoy your company (something we took a little bit of a gamble on with this trip since we'd only known each other five months). And the next most important thing is being able to (sanely) pass the time--a harder task at times than others. I know this will sound counter-intuitive, but we really found that the drive home, when we were taking backroads versus interstates, was actually way more enjoyable than driving through main roads. Sure, going through small towns slowed us down a little bit, but as long as you work a little extra travel time into your schedule, you just might discover that the small towns presents lots of fun distractions (ie--a town with banners in their downtown that had giant red dots on them proclaiming "you are here"). And I guarantee you won't find signs like this along the interstate.

Legit

Another nice thing about traveling with a casual time frame is that it gives the navigator room for error. Since we only had a general idea of the route we were going to take, we carted our atlas around and used it to determine our next course of action. I won't say how many times we decided that we were going to turn onto another highway within five or so miles, but then got distracted and forgot to exit. But since we didn't have a pressing time commitment, we just pulled our map out and recalculated our route.

One of the best things about traveling without a tight time commitment is that it allows you to be able to stop if something interesting strikes your fancy... Or if George Mason is about to beat UConn in the Elite Eight of the NCAA March Madness Tournament and you just need to stop somewhere to watch the end of the game.

Oh random bar in Utica, Illinois, how grateful we are for thee

We also "created" a few games/challenges to help us pass the time as we were driving, many of which utilized our awesome atlas (I'm convinced these are necessary for all road trips). For one, we quizzed each other on the state capitols (multiple times) and also tried to predict the nicknames of each state (and then proceeded to quiz on these). We also took over/under bets on state/city populations, and discovered that South Dakota is the only state in the continental US that does not have an interstate running through its capitol city. My favorite activity was planning out a country-wide road trip and plotting out a very extensive list of what cities/landmarks we would want to visit in each state (and yes, I do still have the list. And yes, we do plan on completing that road trip. Someday. Maybe when we retire).

And in case you can't tell from the randomness of these pictures, we also entertained ourselves taking pictures. We made it a little bit of a competition to see who could take the best/most random scenery picture. Of course, some of the most random things we weren't able to catch on camera (like the lady pulling off the highway outside Chicago at eleven in the morning to puke), but we did manage to land a few solid scenery pictures. And while I won't concede that Darrell won the competition, he did land a pretty solid one as we drove across the Mississippi into Iowa.

Props if you made it all the way through that.... Apparently I had way more to say about that trip than I thought I did. But hopefully you (at the very least!) picked up a few new tips to help with your next road trip!