Lessons from the Road
Life is a Lesson
Some know, some may not but in March I took my first road trip across the country with a few people that I didn’t know all that well, Owen (@owen.m.hart), Mintyce (@mintyce), & Telly (@tellysvision__) but by the end of the trip we were forever indebted.
Originally, I was going to post this on the Localized blog as almost an itinerary of Travel tips. Upon further deliberation, I’ve decided that the trip is much more suited as a chronicling of life lessons and universal messages to heed whether on travel or just in daily life.
What Doesn’t Kill You….
I’ll start this by saying that I knew the plan was ambitious from the planning phase but never in my wildest visions did I expect the trip to happen the way it did. If you follow along with my blog posts over the years, you know I’ve been on a few road trips… in other countries, shit, I’ve even traveled with a coordinated group of people on multiple occasions but something about this one was different. I’m not sure if it was because we all just did a year's Covid bid, 4 creatives just needed a change of scenery and we were all at a crossroads in life, or a mixture of the two but only Owen checked the weather prior to departing. LOL
The goal was to travel from MD to Colorado Springs, CO with only stops for gas while en route, maybe one food stop as we get closer. We packed the van with pillows, blankets, water and snacks to last us all the way to Colorado. We also delegating driving duties as I was elected to be the first driver behind the wheel, 12am till 8am the next day. Mintyce would be next, followed by Owen, and then Tells would get the first leg in the am once reaching Colorado. After my shift went smoothly, I fell asleep in the back seat somewhere between Dayton & Cincinati, OH, and around that time, we heard rumblings of a snowstorm hitting Colorado. To this point, that seemed logical being that Colorado is so mountainous, and figured we’d just have to grab parkas from a store once we arrive.
The weather didn’t start to become a problem until we reached Kansas. After my full 8 hours of sleep in the backseat, I notice on Instagram that Utah also was being hit by the snowstorm which made me do more research, in which I found that Arizona was being hit by the storm as well. At this point, we stopped for gas deep into Kansas and are now driving through a pretty intense rainstorm (6+ hours of rain) but we are only a couple of hours from Colorado Springs during Owen’s duty and decide to alter our route to Denver because hotels in Colorado Springs are booked for the night. I am the co-pilot during Owen’s tour, so I do take partial blame for what happened next, PARTIAL.
As we are exiting Kansas, within an hour from the Colorado line (still 3hrs from Denver), the GPS instructs us to take a side road to connect to a different interstate that will take us directly into Denver and that side road has no street lights and as it turns out, no pavement either. Again, it has been raining in Kansas non-stop for the past 6hrs and the van almost immediately starts to slip and slide until nature brings us to a complete halt. We try to gain traction but the wheels only spin. We try pushing to no avail. We called tow services, fire departments, and the local police dispatch to find that we aren’t the only ones stuck but we are out of reach of help for the foreseeable future.
We found out from the police dispatch, the rain wasn’t letting up and because the town had very few paved roads, no one would be able to get us at least until the rain stopped late the following morning. At 9pm in the middle of nowhere Kansas, with nothing but fields around us, in the climax of a violent thunderstorm and 30 mph winds, you can imagine how scared 4 Black Millenials from the city were for the remainder of the night.
Not So Shady Aftermath
Somehow, we made it through the night without a tornado hitting us or ending up as a plotline for a serial killer mystery (yes, I pinged my location to everyone I could think of), and thanks to a local with farm equipment, we got it out of the mud, literally.
After we survived, we got back on the road en route to Colorado, we actually crossed the state line into Colorado and merge onto the highway towards Denver, only to find out that the snowstorm shut the highway down. Come to find out, the mountainous regions in Colorado don’t prep the streets or plow snow during storms the way we do on the East. The cities sit in valleys so the townspeople wait for the sun to make its way back out and melt the snow. We only learned that information because guards on the route told us that the cities are shut down and hotels booked up until the snow subsided… in a few days.
This forced us to call an audible, a BIG audible. We adjusted the route, made our way down to New Mexico, across the tip of Texas, and into New Orleans just in time for St. Patty’s Day, aka an amazing time.
What ended up happening, was for the best. Turns out, if we didn’t get stuck in Kansas, we would’ve been snowed in Denver for 3 days unprepared for the weather. We would've skipped out on an amazing NOLA experience and most importantly, the bond we built together would never have been as strong.
So where is the lesson, you might be asking?
Listen to the Universe when she speaks.
Travel has a way of revealing you to yourself.
Be solution based, not problem oriented.
Go with the flow & BE LIKE WATER.
We can only control what we can control, the rest is up to fate.
To say that I am grateful for the bond built with these individuals is an understatement. We learned more about ourselves and each other than I ever expected. For how long, I’m unsure but I know that now at the moment we are akin to ronin after our first battle together, we believe we can handle anything thrown at us.