Why I Love to Travel
My first weekend of May was spent in Asheville, North Carolina with 13 of my favorite people: my senior class and our science teacher and her husband. We spent four days in a massive cabin in the middle of nowhere. There was never a dull moment. Every second as full of laughter, the creation of memories and very little sleep. Buckle up, 'cause this is gonna be a long one.
Day 1:
After half the class skipped school for senior skip day, we all met back up at our school to get into our carpools for the two-hour drive up to Asheville. The drive up was nothing short of exciting and I now have a 96 song long playlist to prove it. After stopping at the local Walmart to buy groceries for the next four days and getting strange looks by literally everyone in the store as we walked out with four to five carts full of groceries, we started the half-hour drive to the cabin. Before we were out of the parking lot, the windows were down, air conditioning turned off, and music turned up as loud as it could get. I merged my car onto the highway and as I stuck my hand out the window feeling the waves of wind, Africa came on. Life felt perfect.
After a while of driving in the dark, down backroads, past farms and through "neighborhoods" I started to get worried there was no cabin and we had gotten scammed. But thankfully, within ten minutes we pulled up to a beautiful cabin. we unloaded a crap ton of groceries, all our luggage and started the assembly line of making the ten pizzas we needed for dinner. After our 11 pm dinner, we were all too hyped up on excitement (and pizza) to go to bed so multiple rounds of cards against humanity were played. 2 am rolled around and most everyone went to bed, except the few who still didn't have a tired bone in their bodies. Instead, we hopped in the hot tub on the back porch, right under the star blanketed sky. Sitting in that hot tub made all the problems in the world disappear. All that mattered was everything that was happening right in that moment. Before we knew it, it was 5 am.
I've come to learn that when you stay up late, you reach a certain point in time when going to bed seems utterly pointless and pulling an all-nighter makes more sense, so that's exactly what we did. We grabbed blankets and muffins and made "camp" on the side porch, waiting for the sunrise. Finally, around 7 am we all fell asleep on the porch under the warm sunrise light.
Day 2:
After pulling an all-nighter, Friday morning was a bit rough to wake up to but amazing nonetheless. We made pancakes galore and hung out all morning. Later on in the day, we explored the river out in the back of the house. And of course, we had to stack our Enos. This was an adventure all in itself. after about half an hour of Josiah climbing up and down the trees to get each Eno higher than the last, and many close calls of falling and almost taking down everyone with him, we finally got five Enos stacked and no injuries might I add.
Later on in the day we made lunch, ate it by the creek and explored until we left for our trip into town. It took at least half an hour to get anywhere from the cabin, but wow was it worth it for the view and the experiences that came with it. And I have to say, simply driving everywhere with the windows down might have been my favorite thing about this trip. Asheville didn't go quite as planned as it was raining most of the day but nonetheless it was still worth the drive. We walked around town, saw plenty of beautiful murals, ate at the Mellow Mushroom and laughed as the guys played water fountain roulette getting drenched in water. That night we all went to bed a little late. This was usual for most nights. There was so much to do that sleep became unnecessary, useless and quite pointless for us. There was one moment that night where some of us sat in the living room counting down the hours of sleep we'd get if we went to bed right then and there. By the time we actually went to bed, I think we were down to about four hours of sleep for the day ahead.
Day 3:
This day felt like the shortest and longest day of my life, both in good ways of course. It started with a 5 am wake up call, up before the sun. Groggy and tired we stumbled out of bed, got changed, packed backpacks for our hike and started the hour and a half drive to the trailhead for our sunrise hike. In our typical fashion, we left the house way late and almost missed the sunrise. We ended up pulling over off the highway to watch the sunrise halfway through our drive.
An hour later we were driving up a windy dirt road that went on for miles. I started to get worried we were lost and the address I had found for the hike was going to lead us to some random field in the middle of someone's farm. Thankfully, it didn't and 30 minutes later, we pulled into a parking lot at the base of a trailhead. We took the shorter route to the top of the mountain which in hindsight, was the perfect way to hike up. The whole time you are hiking, the mountains, cities, and the world around you are left behind you. finally, when you reach the top, you get to turn around and your breath gets taken away for a moment at the beauty of it all. We laid down picnic blankets and ate a picnic breakfast above the clouds. The girls did a little photoshoot while the guys built a fire. We all huddled around the fire after breakfast and talked, laughed and watched in disgust as Josiah ate a worm. Everything up there was pure magic.
Waking up so early and the hour and a half drive back to the cabin after the hike left every exhausted that we all took naps and chilled till lunchtime. Thankfully the rain held up all morning during our hike but hit hard once we got back home. It thundered, lightninged, poured and hailed for a while so an intense game of "spicy Uno" was started. We all sat in the living room huddled in blankets playing cards for a while. after the rain let up a bit, the boys went down to the river to do some "deconstructing" making paths for the tubes. Little did we know what was in store for us. An hour later, once many rounds of Uno were played, we all got in our bathing suits and blew up inner tubes in the hot tub waiting for the boys to come get us, telling us they were done and ready for us.
This is where the fun began. We all trekked down to the river with the inner tubes hoping the boys had a clue what they were talking about. We walked through a little makeshift path next to the creek to a rock that jutted out just over the water. We got out on the rock, turned around, put the tubes behind us and sunk into the cold water. We drifted down the creek a bit around fallen trees, over mounds of rocks and past a tiny waterfall till we got to a little beach we could bail at. After everyone had gone a few times, we decided to trek farther into the woods past the house to get higher up in the river for a longer ride down. This went on for a while till the rain felt colder than the river water so we walked back up to the house and went in the hot tub.
Dinner this night was probably my favorite. After making way too much pasta and salad for our meal, I decided we should all sit down for dinner the last night instead of standing around the kitchen like we had done the previous nights. We fit the 11 of us left around the table and ate and talked for what felt like forever. I never wanted it to end, but then again a lot of moments on this trip I never wanted to end. The highlight of dinner was definitely “Jo’s courtroom “where we debated over previous events that had happened on the drive back to the cabin earlier that day. Sitting around that table, laughing till my stomach hurt made me realize how much I have in this class. I've found a family in them, one I never want to lose. And sitting around that table all together made us feel even more like family. Family isn't just blood. Family is whoever you want it to be, and these people are my family.
Once dinner was finished and cleaned up, an intense game of sardines was put into play. For those of you who have no clue what sardines is it's basically reverse hide-and-seek. One person hides, everyone else has to try and find them, and when they do, they have to hide with that person until one person or group is left standing. We turned all the lights off partnered off and went searching through the huge cabin. That night was full of laughter, fear of the dark, screams and so much silliness. I don't think I've ever felt more like I was a kid again than that night. Per usual night 3 was spent staying up late. Most of us crashed on the couch, never wanting the night to end.
Day 4:
Waking up this morning was extremely rough. All the lost sleep got to us on day four. We had to be out of the cabin by 10 and of course, knowing us, it took us almost till 11 to leave. Day four's plan was to waterfall hop all day, have a picnic lunch by one of the falls and finally drive home after a hike behind another fall. Mother Nature had other plans in mind and decided to rain all day so instead, we drove to a bowling alley, bowled, played arcade games, and laser tag for a few hours. We stopped for dinner on the way home, all of us half asleep around the restaurant table. The last hour of the drive home after dinner was all kind of a blur. We were too delirious to remember any of it or make sense of what we were doing but somehow we all got home safely. Back at school, we talked in the parking lot for over an hour trying to extend the trip as long as we could. going home meant the trip was over and that these memories would be just that, memories.
These moments, I will never get back again, and honestly, that's okay. I know it'll never be the same again and although I'd pay anyone any amount of money for someone to take me back, I know that those moments were supposed to live in that moment for a reason and live only in that moment. Yeah, it hurts for it to be over, but I can't wait for all the other adventures that will come in the next four years with these incredible people. The moments, these people...that why I love to travel. I travel for the people (the ones you travel with and the new ones you meet), the experiences, the sights, the memories, the stories. I travel because it makes my heart happy. I travel because it makes me feel fulfilled, it makes my life exciting and worth it. I travel not to forget the world but to see it...to make the world my own and make it one I want to live in. Traveling isn't for everyone, but it sure is for me.
