Travels...

I can distinctly remember my first "real" road trip without adult supervision. My friend Dave was accepted to Penn State's summer session program, and invited us up for a long weekend. And a long weekend it was.

I was out of high school all of three weeks when we hit the road for a three and a half hour trek to the geographical center of Pennsylvania, otherwise known as "Happy Valley". I've been to places like the Jersey Shore for a week without parents around, but that felt so routine, having gone there every summer since infancy. But PSU for a weekend? In the middle of June? Sweet!

Looking back, I can see now how I was so ill-equipped to deal with the world. I never listened to my teachers or parents, and if I did I may have saved myself a ton of trouble. Oh, well. Live and Learn.

Anyway, back to the memory. In the days leading up to our epic embarkation, we went about procuring certain items for our trip; salted snacks, a cooler stocked with "road sodas", various cassette tapes and cds to "jam out" to, and a fair amount of "little green bag". Yeah, you know exactly what I'm talkin' about...

I was smack dab in the middle of my hippie phase, all decked out in the standard garb; rancid sandals, terrible tie-dyed t-shirts, heavy corduroy patchwork pants (in the 90-degree heat?), and my "starter" beard. It'd be two more years until it could fully be called a beard, but I had to look the part so other hippies would know I was "down". God forbid I had no street-cred from my brothers and sisters. Jeez.

We took Paul's famous black Jetta. It was me, Paul (obviously) and Gabe. Paul was set to attend Delaware and Gabe was slated for PSU, but starting in the fall, and I was (cough, cough) heading to my lovely little community college, DCCC, affectionately called D-C Cubed by its students. I pretty much slacked off heavily in high school as a C+ student and community college was the only place I could go.

The car ride started off pretty uneventfully as I was relegated to the back seat, probably to stand guard over our cooler of Bud Dry. We slowly sipped our brew, as to not get too pissed before the real party started. Now, anyone who knows me knows that I'm pretty much the biggest stereo Nazi of all-time, always wanting to listen to what I want to listen to. I had a satchel full of Dead bootlegs and was driving to the hole pretty hard, but alas; we'd have to settle for more conservative fare as Gabe manned the hi-fi.

Anyway, we made it to State and to be honest, the events of that weekend were quite blurry. The important part of the trip was the ride home, in relation to the musical memory. I had this feeling on the way home that with these guys going away to school, as was everyone else but me, these trips would be few and far between. We lit up the last of the doobage about two hours into the trip home, and as weed always does, it made me very sentimental.

As Gabe had shotgun on the way up, I got it on the way home. So I was free to play what I wanted to, thanks to Paul's tolerance (or indifference). I had to rock some Jerry and Co., as I played bootlegs on cassette the whole ride.

There was a point where we all fell silent, as the dead jammed their way out of Buddy Holly's Not Fade Away into Goin' Down The Road Feelin' Bad. (Tape-heads will know this as NFA>GDTRFB, as it was too much to write on the outside of a Maxell XLII 90 jacket.) Sentimentality in full swing, I stared out the window and let this emotion I was feeling wash over me, this "not wanting to let go of the good times of our last summer together". I was going down the road feeling bad...

We did more trips like that throughout the four years my friends went to various schools around the northeast United States, but I can recall this moment as being definitive in that it forced me to grow up a bit, learning that you can take the times you spent together and the memories you created with you wherever you go, as long as you file them in the Rolodex of your mind marked under "music".