March 12

Lent Devotion

To celebrate our graduation, my dear friend Kendall and I took a weeklong road trip from our college in Massachusetts to Seattle, where she would settle into her new apartment (which we joke is about the size of the first-year dorm room we shared a bunkbed in). The plan seemed simple to us at the time- all we had to do was make it to Seattle in time for me to catch my flight and attend the high school graduation of my younger brother, Sam, the following day. Overall, we were picturing the road trip as a sort of week-long “victory tour” around the United States; we had our joint Spotify playlist filled with Taylor Swift (Ken’s request in anticipation of attending her tour later in the summer), my notebook to track all of the weird bumper stickers and roadkill we came across, and of course our trusty steed, Kendall’s blue Volkswagen she loving named Beau.

I could go on for pages about the many road bumps in our journey, most of which were definitely a result of finalizing the details of the trip almost entirely during finals week in which our brains were being overworked, and the following senior week, a celebratory week for all graduates in which I don’t think either of us used our brains the entire time. From forgetting that our GPS wouldn’t work in Canada (which made for a very exciting 10 minutes of freaking out at each other while trying to find our exit on the crowded freeway) to getting stuck in an endless loop of detours in downtown Detroit (we didn’t know that the Chevrolet Detroit Grand Prix would be happening on the exact date we were there), and even miscalculating the amount of time it would take us to cross the midwest which resulted in two very long days of driving (to this day we still don’t know how that one happened).

There were, however, so many more moments of pure amazement and joyfulness, both at the landscape and the people we met. When I think of our road trip, I remember arriving at the Badlands right as the sun was setting, rolling down the windows, and driving through the park at 5mph completely silent in awe. I remember her pulling over on the side of the road in Wyoming so both of us could get a better view of the bighorn mountains that were just too beautiful to see only through car windows. I remember playing a fantastic late-night game of chess with a fellow traveler in a bar in South Dakota and Ken speaking in length to an older couple on the beach of Yellowstone Lake.

It is one thing to experience the joy of traveling, but to do so with somebody who has been with me through everything since our first scary night together in our too-small dorm room was an experience like no other. We began our growth into our young adult selves together, so it felt very full circle to conclude our college experience together with another week almost mirroring our initial weeklong orientation that kicked off our college experience: meeting new people, getting outside of our comfort zones, and heavily relying on each other to make the crossing into our next phase of life.