Road Trip Reawakening
I’m a firm believer in low expectations as a key element of a happy life. When you go into anything fully expecting to have the best time of your life, you’re inevitably disappointed. How often can the stars really align? Examples abound in all parts of life. All the best concerts I’ve seen were in part a product of not expecting much going in. And no victory is sweeter than the upset.
One of the best parts of a road is that the unknown makes it impossible to have well-defined, high expectations. There’s such a huge variance for what could happen that as long as your car doesn’t break down and you have something to report back, you’re ahead of the game.
Partly for this reason, I’ve never taken a road trip where I didn’t start with a fair bit of excitement and anticipation. Even when you know your traveling company well and the route is set, you never know what conversations and experiences are waiting. “Who knows what could happen?” is a big part of it.
But what if the prevailing attitude is “Who gives a shit?” There are low expectations, and then there’s the total absence of expectations.
In this episode, the total lack of expectations was so completely liberating that the result was a life-altering experience. It also features one of the best articulations of why the road trip is so alluring:
“Once you give into the notion of a road trip, you're suspending time that you knew in the conventional sense. You're suspending deadlines. You're suspending paying bills. All the other shit that makes life a drag is in suspension because you have a new relationship with time. And that relationship is, ‘What are we going to do with it?’ Not, ‘What do I have to do?’ That choice, being able to explore those options and that new sense of time, is extremely liberating.”
This is the story of Rob and Toodles, the ocean and oranges, Widespread and underwear, and plugging back into this whole surreal journey called life.
Rob’s first road trip was so formative that it suggested a career path. He’s now an award-winning writer and senior editor for The Car Connection. If you want to know anything about the models just hitting the market, check out his articles.