Humans of a Summer Roadtrip - Ashlyn

 

"The Phoenix area is miserable, it’s a cesspool. Arizona wasn’t so bad, though, I did make a few friends when I was down there and that was strictly through Tinder so thank the lord for Tinder. I met a guy, we went on a date to a bar and we got drunk and I went back to his apartment and I made a friend right off the bat. I’ve always been able to make friends like that. Arizona was kinda nice, I was there for three months (and by nice I mean it was miserable). My grandparents are, I don’t know how to describe them. My grandfather is just like, he’s a conservative boomer, I literally call him boomer and he calls me snowflake. If this paints a better picture for you, in his Arizona backyard with his fake grass, in Mesa at least there’s no grass anywhere, he had these tiles and they were Mexican people taking a siesta on the tiles and when I asked him about them, I was like “hey, why do you have those tiles don’t you think it’s wrong?” And he was like “why what’s wrong with them, they’re just taking a nap.” And I was like “oh my god, okay.” He’s retired, he doesn’t work anymore but my Mimi works like 24/7 and she was working from home. It really sucked because the only room they had available for me was in her office and it was a frickin air mattress, and she didn’t like it being inflated while she was working at her desk so I had to get up at 6:30 every morning, deflate the air mattress and then, like, hang out in the living room or something because I couldn’t sleep anywhere else. So I would just watch the news with Boomer and his dog Cooper who weighs like 120 pounds, he’s a big boy. It wasn’t bad, but driving from Arizona was the best part of me being out west. It was still miserable but it wasn’t too bad, like I had my friends but on a road trip you learn things about people you didn’t think you would. Like, how down bad my one friend is for any girl because he left the trip a day early while we were still driving, he ditched us to get a f***ing flight to hookup with a girl at home. He was like “I want this girl so bad” and then he just left us. Then it was just my other friend and I and we were like “what the hell are we gonna do?” And our friend who left said “well you can just drive the rest of the way.” We were in Pennsylvania, I had to drive an hour out of my way to Philly to drop him off at the airport. That was a miserable day, but everything before that was nice. Colorado was really nice but it was rainy when we were there which sucked because I wanted to show them how beautiful Colorado was, but it was just mist and clouds and downpour. We did stop to get some marijuana, though (we are all over 21). Wyoming was actually kind of a vibe, like there’s nothing it’s just farmland and weird signs for miles but it was actually really pretty. The grass, it was like golden which is weird because it was summer and it wasn’t so much green it was golden. It was nice, although I will say this: they don’t pave their f***ing roads. They don’t upkeep them but that’s because you’re driving on a stretch for literally hundreds of miles, so I don’t think anyone takes care of any roads like that. But the speed limit is 80 which was really nice, but we actually got pulled over by a statie for going 112 in a 75 because it dropped from 80 to 75. I think it was a speed trap or something. It was my friend who later flew home that was driving and we had just picked up paraphernalia in Colorado, and if you didn’t know Wyoming is a zero tolerance state so we get over the border, and we get pulled over for speeding. We had bongs and joints and more than the legal amount that’s allowed because the legal amount was none, you’re not allowed to have any weed. So the statie comes up and our car reeks, and I thought we were gonna go to jail and it was in the middle of nowhere. He asked for license and registration and I asked him “from who” and then he asked whose car it was and i said “it’s mine” and he said “I want yours and his” because my friend was the one driving, I was in the passenger seat and my other friend was in the back seat asleep. My friend who was driving is Colombian and Ecuadorian, so I was also scared for him because the way that cops are in the middle of nowhere out west I’m sure they don’t treat people of color very well, but they just don’t in general anyway, so I was terrified for him. He was nervous and shaking, and the statie came back and said “you guys were going REALLY fast” and we said “yeah we know we’re on a road trip, you know, we’ve been driving for 8 hours and we’re just trying to get to our next stop.” It clearly smelled like weed in the car, and there signs for miles that said shit like “don’t toke, it’s not worth it” and all this other stuff and giant billboards that were anti-abortion and anti-weed.But everything turned out fine, he got a $300 speeding ticket and then we got to keep driving, nothing bad happened thankfully because things could’ve been a lot worse but they weren’t. We were going to camp in Wyoming, but it ended up raining and I really just didn’t want to camp in the rain so we kept driving, it was only 4pm. So we ended up going up north to Montana, because my friends smoked all of my Colorado weed and I wanted more and my friend in the back looked it up online and said Montana was a legal state. I was driving, because after my friend got the ticket I said “I’m driving now.” I decided to drive to Billings because it was the closest biggest town, it was insane and I later found out that it’s like a really bad town. It’s a run down shit shack pretty much, there’s nothing there and it’s very industrial and the vibes are really f***ed up. We got there and we mapped a dispensary. I'm so pissed telling this it still makes me mad, because I drove 2 hours out of the way and we were supposed to be in South Dakota. We got to the dispensary and it turns out Montana is only a medical marijuana state. So then we ditched Montana and we ended up on the western side of South Dakota where Badlands National Park is, so we stayed there for the night. It was beautiful, I loved it there and the sunset was amazing in that park and I recommend everyone to go to the Badlands but it is dry and so windy and cold even though it was summer. The ground was made out of clay, it was dried clay and we were trying to stake our tent but it was so windy, probably 50 mph winds that were just whipping us. I didn’t have a wind tent, just a run-of-the-mill regular camping tent and we weren’t prepared, we hadn’t eaten all day and the only food we had was cooked on this little propane camping stove I had but it was so windy we couldn’t light a flame. It took us forever to even light it so I was trying to cook and they were trying to set up the tent, we were losing daylight and didn’t have lamps, we just had flashlights. We got the tent up and were cooking at 8pm, but we were tired and cranky and fighting. This was when my friend brought up taking a flight home early to see the girl he was obsessed with and we told him that was really selfish. We woke up at 5:30 and packed up. Driving through South Dakota was okay, it was pretty but a lot of farmland, soybeans, corn and wheat mostly, and there were tiny signs along the whole interstate for this place called Wall Drug. So we stopped there, it was weird and they had this thing called the Cowboy Cantina and it was a bunch of cowboy puppets with instruments that went off every hour and apparently it’s been a thing since the 30’s. There wasn’t anything cool about Minnesota, I just remember it getting really humid and it felt wet and it was 80 or 90 degrees. We ended up camping in Wisconsin near Lake Michigan, it was wet even though it hadn’t rained. It was just so humid and there were so many frogs everywhere at our campsite. I love frogs so I had fun and that was a better night, but things also started to go downhill because my friend decided he was going to leave us a day early, so we were mad at him. I fought with my other friend about how she had no respect since she smoked all of my weed and just complained the entire trip. I really started to notice how inexperienced she was, which wasn’t her fault, but I didn’t take that into account when I invited her to fly to Arizona to come on the road trip. I wasn’t in the right place to teach her how to do things like light a camp stove or set up a tent, and she’s not a fast learner so I had to show her how to do these things multiple times, and I got really annoyed. She just wanted to have fun the whole time and didn’t want to drive that much, but we apologized to each other. We weren’t really talking to our other friend because we were still mad at him, and driving through the midwest brought us to psychosis level. We had fun in Illinois because we got to pick up more weed. We got along there and I was just trying to keep the peace because we only had about 2 more days and when we did get home we wouldn’t have to talk to each other for a little bit because we probably didn’t want to see each other for a while. I slept the entire drive through Indiana, and my friend who got the ticket and was flying home drove. I woke up and I said “when the f*** did we hit Ohio?” And they both said “we’ve been in Ohio for 30 minutes.” There was this point in Ohio where we were trying really hard to get along with each other and we came up with this list of 30 different affirmations about the midwest, I think one of them was something like “we won’t understand your road rules” because they were really stupid rules. Another was “I will not let midwest psychosis take over me” or something like that, we were losing our f***ing minds. Pennsylvania sucked, it was easy to get lost and there was a hurricane in the Philly area so it down-poured the entire time. We dropped our friend off at the airport there. We went through upstate New York, Albany was one of the prettiest towns I’ve ever been in and there were a lot of old buildings from the 20’s. Then, we drove through Vermont which didn’t take long. Once we hit New Hampshire we were like, I guess this means we’re home."