Every now and again, I want to write something just so I can prove to myself that I can still put a few sentences together and that school wasn't all for naught.
While I have topics I can write about but, for reasons I won't get into, don't want to address here, I think I'll write about one of my favorite road trips.
Not the most orinial idea, but it was the first idea that came to my head and I hate staring at a blank post screen with a blinking cursor.
This specific trip was during my second year at UF, when Greg, his roommate, and I were hanging out at the apartment one weekend evening, doing nothing in particular. We usually went to a local 24-hour hipper-than-thou coffeeshop downtown but for some odd reason didn't go that evening. Approaching a mild boredom and encroaching on midnight, our topic of conversation eventually turned into St. Augustine. OK not so much "turned" as shifted 180 degrees and arbitrarily mentioned: "Does anyone want to go to St. Augustine?"
Now, one of the great things about Gainesville is that it is centered in the state, and thus, only about 1 hour from each coast, making such trips none too inconceivable. Man, sometimes I really miss Florida, and I see an advert for the UF MBA program here...but I digress.
So, seeing as I had the most reliable car, we took off for St. Augustine around midnight. The thinking was that since St. Augustine had several liberal arts colleges in the area, that there must be a place just like our favorite haunt in town.
After an hour drive, we were sadly proved wrong. The place was dead. We drove around desperately searching for something to do, but there was nothing. During our drive through town, we did manage to find ourselves almost driving into the Intracoastal Waterway by way of a poorly marked boat launch. Yay brakes!
As St. Augustine was a wash, we headed off to the beach, which is actually quite cool at 230 in the morning, as you can drive on well marked paths right on the beach. However, it is decidedly less cool when, following poor advice - Greg - we manage to get the car stuck in an unfun amount of sand. This is before cell phones, so we were left to our own devices, and it must have taken us at least an hour to get the car free, using my floor mats as traction for the tires. When I got rid of the car about 4 years ago, I'm sure there was still sand imbedded permanently into the carpet.
Digging cars out of sand at 3 in the morning makes people invariably hungry, so instead of heading back to G-ville, we decided to head south on A1-A (I think) toward Daytona Beach. It seems as though everyone has a 4am Denny's story, and this would happen to be mine. This was the only place open and we were really hungry, which are as good reasons as any to hit up Denny's. The place was actually crowded considering the time.
I think after 5am and a Denny's meal, all logic is lost, so instead of heading back home, we continued on down south to Daytona so that we could eventually find a public access beach we could crash at, which we did find at 530 or so.
I think we managed to grab a few minutes of sleep on the beach, but it wasn't nearly as comfortable as you'd imagine sleeping at the beach at 530am would be.
We couldn't see the sunrise, as everything was covered in a thick shroud of fog. However, we were awakened by a "presence," in the form of a giant goodyear blimp hovering low over the ocean about a hundred yards away.
Talk about an alarm clock!
We made our way slowly home later in the morning...slowly, as we happened to have picked the precise weekend for our little jaunt that the Daytona 500 race was going on at the raceway.
I think I slept the rest of the weekend. Also, writing this has brought a lot of memories back. Amazing thing, nostalgia. It is making me really miss college life right now...the dorms, my friends, UF. Everything. There are so many things I missed out in at UF because I was too shy or reserved or whatever, but right now...it was bloody fantastic.
No comments:
Post a Comment