Improvise

You know that feeling you get when you’re about to go on a vacation and experience a new place? Or the feeling you get when you get dropped off at college about to start a new chapter of your life. The feeling of intense curiosity of the unknown, of not really having an idea of what to expect or what is going to happen. This is how I felt driving out of our driveway and down our street, anxious in a good way. Yet there is a calming feeling amongst the nervous excitement. It can almost be described as peace. Peace in trusting that this next adventure of six weeks will be filled with some of my favorite moments, and the excitement that all of that potential is right in front of me. It is a difficult feeling to put into words but knowing something thrilling and unknown is taking place puts me into state of emotion that is hard to match. It never quite goes away the entire trip, but it definitely it the most intense at the beginning.

We were finally on the road, first headed to Iowa State because Mikal forgot a few items at college. Nothing too eventful on this first part of the journey, but it turned out to be a good thing we headed to Ames because we ended up grabbing quite a few things that we didn’t originally think about packing. After the brief stop, we hopped in the car and headed west, not entirely sure where we would be sleeping that night but knowing we wanted to make as much ground as possible. I don’t recall too many thoughts or conversations during this beginning stretch of the road, probably because there really wasn’t any conversation going on. This was the beginning of a common theme throughout the trip, audiobooks. Mikal has been a fan of fantasy book series for some time and wanted to introduce me to them as well. My extent of fantasy reading had been Harry Potter, a bit of Eragon, and Game of Thrones, so I was excited to see what else was out there. Mikal told me to listen to Name of The Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. This is how the first 9 hours of our road trip started, Mikal with his headphones in listening to his book, me with my headphones in listening to my book. Only the occasional sharing of a cool moment from the book constituted us removing our headphones for a brief moment. I will get into this more in future stories, but we listened to hundreds of hours of audiobooks throughout our trip. Something about exploring new places and being on the road while being so deeply invested in a completely different fantasy world pairs well together, almost as if you’re living out two different lives at the same time.

Anyway, we were cruising west, thinking about driving for another hour or so and then crashing wherever we ended up. It was about 10:00 pm but we weren’t too tired, probably still riding the high and excitement that we were starting our adventure. Mikal was driving, I was sitting shotgun, both of us with our headphones in staring forward over an expansive amount of nothing that only the Midwest can provide when out of nowhere a deer leaps out of the ditch and directly into our car. The way the deer just appeared seemingly out of midair meant Mikal didn’t even have time to swerve or break but nailed the deer with a loud thud and it flew over our car and into the ditch. A few choice words were directed at nothing in particular as our brains catch up on the reality of what just happened. Mikal pulls over and throws on the hazards, we jump out to assess the damage and a small part of me is holding onto hope that it’s just a minor dent but nothing too serious. That all changes when we see the entire front left side is smashed into the wheel and we realize this is not going to be a minor fix. Now, it is important to note that we have absolutely zero idea where we are, we had been driving through the plains of south Dakota and didn’t think we had passed a town for a while. Luckily, a policeman saw us hit the deer and immediately came to check on us. Mikal went and sat in his squad car while I did the only logical thing a 22-year-old would do in this situation, called dad. “Uhhh dad, we hit a deer, cars fucked, Mikal’s in a cop car, they called a tow-truck, not sure what else to do but thought you should know.” The tow truck driver picks us and the car up and drives us to the nearby metropolis that is Murdo, South Dakota, population: 488. The driver informs us that based on his quick glance of the car he would assume that it is totaled. This news sinks in and we realize we are seven hours from home, it is 10:45, we are in a tiny town, and we have no vehicle left. No vehicle makes a road trip a challenging endeavor to face. After we check into the hotel, we run to the gas station next door before it closes to get some instant noodles for dinner and a six-pack of Miller Lite to wash it down. After a moment to decompress we need to start thinking about our action plan. Can we rent a car? No, no available rentals. This means one of my parents are going to have to come get us, but that’s a conversation for tomorrow morning. Mikal and I sit there and drink our beer, reflecting a bit on what just happened. Frustrated at the odds of hitting a deer on our first day or a six-week trip, knowing we have to go home to restart at mile zero down a car. Now, there are a few different ways you can respond to a situation like this, and what comes to mind is something Blake and I have said to each other at various points of hardship or bad luck, that you cannot control what happens to you, but it is completely up to you in how you are going to respond. This was one of those bad luck moments, and we just decided not to be too bent out of shape about it. Two things always help me make light of challenging situations; perspective and knowing it will make a solid story. The policeman and tow truck driver were telling us how lucky we were that we were both completely fine, that recently somebody in the area had died hitting a deer. It forces you to take a step back and say yeah, it sucks that Mikal’s car is totaled and we have to restart the trip, but it could have been so much worse in many ways. The second is a story, a lot of times when I recollect on trips from years ago the moments that come to mind are the challenging ones. The bumps in the road often standout as the best memories and the “remember when’s” of traveling. Even looking back and reflecting on this trip a lot of my favorite moments shared with Mikal were the uncomfortable ones where something didn’t go as planned. And hitting a deer and totaling Mikal’s car on day one will definitely stand out as a key moment from this trip for many years.

The next day we woke up late and laid around the hotel room listening to our audiobooks. We knew we would be waiting for most of the day for my mom to come get us, pack up her car, and drive home. Around lunchtime we decided to go check out of the room and walk around the town to see what we could get for lunch. We walked to the dealership first to drop off our bags at the car, and then walked the only street in town with restaurants on it. Unfortunately, the spot we wanted to go to wasn’t opening for two more hours so we wasted some time and walked around some more. It was a scorcher of a day, high 80’s and Mikal and I had nothing to do but sit outside and wait. We both were lost in our audiobooks and content to be hanging out and not talking much. We got drinks from the grocery store and sat on a bench alongside the main street and baked in the sun. There really wasn’t any other place where we could wait so we just sat there sweating and counting down the minutes until the restaurant opened. At one point we needed to get out of the sun, so we walked down this alley and sat beneath some trees in somebody’s back yard. Here we sat, playing with the pine needles and pinecones absentmindedly waiting for the restaurant to open. Finally, we walk to the restaurant to be there as soon as it opens up, hot, starving, tired, and a little restless. We get there and the cooks tell us they aren’t going to open for another hour or so. At this point we are too hungry to wait so go to a local diner attached to the gas station that we were nearly as thrilled on. Just doing whatever we can to waste some time, including stopping at the casino attached to the other gas station. A few more hours of us sitting in the alley the trees or on a bench and my mom arrives. We transfer everything from Mikal’s car into hers and head back to Minnesota. Get home just past midnight, fall asleep immediately, and wake up early the next day to transfer everything into my car and gear up for round two. My car is just slightly smaller than Mikal’s, so it is a tight squeeze to get everything packed in there. We head out mid-morning and start all over again, audiobooks playing in our headphones and a lot of open road in front of us.

I do not really have any pictures from this time of the trip, unfortunately I tend to only take pictures of things that really catch my eye. So, I decided to use this picture of Mikal I took in Glacier National Park a few days later. This is one of my favorite pictures and to me symbolizes the real start to our trip. Sometimes it’s fun to think that without the unconventional start to the trip maybe I wouldn’t have ever taken this picture or any other one for that matter. That things always end up working out okay in the end and without the demon deer coming out of nowhere and destroying our car the trip might have looked completely different. Just a reminder to myself to enjoy every part of what is going on in a trip and in life. That every moment we have experienced is shaping us to exactly who we are today, and that sometimes we need challenging moments to push us in slightly different directions on our path. Enjoy the process, because all the best moments don’t come when it is complete, but on every step along the way.