My First Road Trip

The idea of going on a road trip with my friends has always been appealing to me. It’s a getaway with no parents, no boundaries, where anything can happen. One can choose to go basically anywhere in reasonable driving distance. The movie Road Trip, my favorite movie, portrays my ideal road trip. Four guys head out with a basic goal, to get to Austin before the tape that was mailed there gets there. In the end the destination turns out to be far less significant than the journey. Their car blows up, they steal a bus from a blind girl, and they find refuge in a “sketchy” motel, an all black fraternity and their friend’s grandparents’ home. The best part of the story is the ride.
I got my license and my car about a year and a half ago and since then I’ve been trying to plan out road trips. Boston, Buffalo, a friend’s island in Canada, Myrtle Beach, Darien Lake, Jersey Shore, various colleges and the City have all been in the works. Unfortunately, the idea of taking my friends on an unsupervised trip as a sixteen or seventeen year old driver doesn’t thrill most parents. Road trip after road trip turned out to be no trip after no trip. Finally, last summer, when it seemed all hopes of a road trip were lost, we received an OK from my goofy Dutch friend Wytes’ Parents. It wasn’t my ideal vision of a car full of crazy kids with no real plan but it was the best we could do.
We decided we’d either go to Darien Lake or the Jersey Shore. An amusement park seemed to be more of a one day experience and was a bit too close to be considered a legitimate road trip so we chose Jersey Shore. We figured camping would be the easiest lodging so we threw a tent in the trunk. We took some cash, packed some snacks, got directions to the coastline and headed out. We’d just go with the flow; find a camping ground, a good beach and whatever else we needed when we got there. What could go wrong?
It was a long drive. Less then an hour in, we broke down in a little town called Lisle. We met a funny redneck stoner who helped us fix our flat. Unfazed, we kept our heads up and headed onward. It took us a good five and a half to six hours of driving before we hit the shore. We found our first beach in a town called Belmar on the northern part of the Jersey shore. It was evening already so the beach was almost entirely vacant and it was cooling down. We chilled on the beach and went for a swim and then decided to go set up camp so we could still go out later. After a long search, we found the only two campgrounds the locals knew of, right next to each other. However, both were too expensive and required that someone age twenty-one or older accompany you. Since camping wasn’t going to work, we decided we’d just sleep in my car.
We drove down to Seaside Heights and parked in the back of a hotel’s parking lot. We set up our beds, swigged some Barton’s and headed out to the boardwalk. It looked great. There were tons of people, arcades, all sorts of food, several games and a bunch of rides. Absolutely everything was outrageously priced. There wasn’t a single thing that seemed worth its price. There were rides that cost twenty dollars per person after a half hour line. Discouraged, we called it a night. We started walking back to the car when it pulled up to a stoplight behind a tow truck. I flipped out and made the tow truck driver stop in the middle of the road. The owner of the hotel had seen us setting up our beds so he called the police to and had my car towed for parking on private property. We got the tow truck driver to give us the car back for a fee of about $60. To add insult to injury we had to pay a fine which we were told would be over $200 for parking on private property. We spent the next hour or so arguing with the hotel manager and the cops in vain. We gave up, left, and ended up sleeping on the side of the road in some random residential neighborhood.
The next morning we woke up, wasted no time, and headed straight for the beach. We spent all day kickin’ back, relaxing in the sun. It was a pretty good day but by about 3 o’clock the beach began to lose its excitement. We decided to just go home then because there just was anything else to do, that was worth its cost, and we didn’t want to deal with finding a better place to sleep. On the way back we stopped to eat at the first White Castle I had ever been to. Sadly enough, that was one of the highlights of our trip. All things considered it was a good learning experience but a pretty disappointing road trip. We learned that a thorough plan could in fact be quite useful.