It was June of 1996, and I was eighteen. I was at the age where the open road felt like a calling, as I had spent many years riding in the passenger seat with my Dad, and was eager to hit the road on my own. I had just graduated high school and was hitting the road with my best friend Derek bound for Panama City. His dad loaned us his well-loved ’89 Honda Civic, complete with peeling bumper stickers and a cracked dashboard, but it looked and smelled like freedom to us. With a couple hundred bucks between us, a CD case filled with Green Day, Nirvana, and Guns & Roses, we took off from our small town in Virginia and pointed the car vaguely south. Panama City, Florida may have been the destination, but really, it was the trip itself that we really looked forward to.
This was back in the days before smart phones and GPS, so we relied on a beaten up old Rand McNally road atlas that I stole from my Dad’s truck to get us there. And we had to stop to make the occasional call home from a payphone to reassure our parents we hadn’t gotten lost or been arrested anywhere along the way.
Gas was just over a dollar a gallon, and snacks were whatever we could buy at 7-Eleven with loose change—usually Surge, beef jerky, and those pink and blue frosted Pop-Tarts we’d eat straight out of the package. Even though we were on a limited budget, we didn’t follow a straight line to Panama City. We wound our way around took in the sights where ever we happened to be.
At night, we’d just crash at rest stops, stretched out in the two front seats of the car, hoping some hitch-hiking serial killer didn’t wander by and take an interest in us.
Every stop brought its own highlights. In Pigeon Forge, TN, we wandered into a strip mall arcade and lost three hours to Killer Instinct and Daytona USA. Somewhere in Georgia, we snuck into a movie theater and watched the Kurt Russel movie, Executive Decision. Somewhere in Alabama, a lightning storm had us pulling off the road and sitting on the car hood under an interstate overpass since the windshield wipers didn’t work on the car. And when we got to Panama City, there was a short-lived, but intense 48-hour romance with a young lady who was also on a road trip of freedom.
By the time we hit Panama City in Florida, we were running on fumes…financially, physically, and in the car itself. But we felt free. And I’m not sure if I’ve ever felt that free again actually.
We took pictures on disposable cameras, but they’ve been lost to time. We bummed cigarettes in gas station parking lots. We ran out of quarters to make those phone calls home. The car smelled like sweaty teen guys and fast food fries, and every CD we had in the car we played to death.
We took our time getting back. I knew that the window was already closing. That window of short-lived opportunity where I could just be totally free. I knew everything was about to change…college, jobs, bills, and more. But for that ten days, life was nothing but open lanes and endless possibility. No GPS and no cell phones. No social media to constantly update with photos from the trip. Just the road, the breeze rolling in through the rolled down windows, a CD case full of scratched CDs, and the belief that anything was possible in a beat-up Honda Civic.
I wasn’t just on a trip. I was driving through one of the last great analog summers, and didn’t even know it at the time.
I miss that kind of freedom.
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