I Miss Road Trips

Road Trips as Resistance

I miss road trips.

Or maybe I miss the idea of them. Maybe I’m romanticizing the perfect road trip that has not happened yet. Maybe I’m stitching together the best parts of the ones I have taken. The quiet gas station coffee at sunrise, the weird little roadside smoke stops, the good conversation, the silence, the music…

Maybe it is nostalgia. Maybe it is desire. Maybe it is both.

But with all the recent bullshit around air travel, and my own need to experience new things, see new places, and feel expanded again, I keep thinking about the road this spring and summer. Not just as a backup plan. Not just as the cheaper option. But as its own kind of offering.

There is something about a road trip that returns you to yourself.

You remember how much exists outside of your routine. Outside of the same five blocks of your neighborhood, the same cafés, the same group chat, the same problems, the same version of yourself. And maybe that is part of why road trips feel so necessary right now.

To go see something for yourself. To choose discovery over passivity. To widen your perspective in a time that seems committed to making all of us smaller, angrier, more afraid, and more disconnected from each other. That feels like a kind of resistance to me.

Expansion does not only live overseas. It does not only happen through passport stamps and curated luxury itineraries. Of course, travel abroad can change your life. But so can driving six hours to sit by water you have never seen before. So can ending up in a Black-owned roadside café in a small town. So can stumbling across a field, a mountain, a juke joint, a diner, a beach, a bookstore, a church parking lot, a barbecue stand, a patch of America that reminds you how much life is happening outside your bubble.

There are so many beautiful pockets of nature, Blackness, and whimsy across this country.

And we deserve to see them.

We deserve long drives with the windows down.
We deserve playlists made for motion.
We deserve bad motel art and excellent gas station snacks.
We deserve to pull over because the light is hitting the trees just right.
We deserve to be surprised.
We deserve to feel small in front of something beautiful.
We deserve to be reminded that the world still has texture.
We deserve new context.
We deserve wonder.

A road trip can remind you of that.

It can remind you that there is more than one way to live.
More than one kind of beauty.
More than one pace.
More than one future.

And maybe that is what I am really missing.

Not just the trip itself, but the permission to become a little different on the way.

So yes, maybe this is me encouraging road trips this spring and summer.

Go see the nature.
Go see the Blackness.
Go see the weird little towns.
Go see the beautiful little diners.
Go see the art.
Go see the water.
Go see the places that make you ask who else you could be if you kept moving.

Go remind yourself that your perspective deserves expansion, even if you cannot afford the overseas trip right now.

We deserve to see.

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