Last year, four best friends packed up and piled into a green Subaru which would be their headquarters for the next two and a half weeks. These friends had over a thousand miles and over five states ahead of them. These friends were traveling to see mountains for the first time, climb inside the Grand Canyon, white water raft, eat dinner thousands of feet in the sky and endless other adventures. Carefully calculated, they had everything planned and everything ready.

That was their biggest downfall.

It wasn’t the planning of how much money for gas, or the planning for how many hours exactly they’d spend in the car. Where their downfall was lied in the expectations of their own minds.

When you’re trying something new, people tell you the best way to experience something is to have no expectations at all. Be the rock on the shore: be present and accept the waves that splash and throw themselves into you. This may be a cliché piece of advice, but it is the most beneficial.

When my three best friends and I traveled the unknown states of the west last summer, we were each in a very different place. We were in a toxic relationship, we were recent high school graduates, we were trying to untangle ourselves from any mess past relationships left us with, we were getting ready to leave home in a few months, we were exercising our independence.

Though in different places, in a way, each of us desperately needed a change of scenery, a change of heart and a change of mind. We were so sure that this road trip, eight months in the making, was going to be the solution to all of our problems.

We were hoping for a change. We were riding on this far-away hope that some time along this trip, on a beautiful snow covered mountain somewhere, we would find all of the answers to all of our problems that our apparent intricately complicated lives was drowning us with.

We brought duffle bags and backpacks filled to the brim into that green Subaru with us, as we did these hopes.

That was our biggest downfall.

And our magical epiphanies never happened.

There was no moment like in the movies where you’re an independent woman and all of a sudden you’re overcome with this great self-power that fills you with knowledge on how to better yourself and your life. None of us transformed into Julia Roberts suddenly. There was no “Eat, Pray, Love” happening.

After a discussion with a friend about “The Art of Travel,” by Alain De Botton, the realization of our faults came so simply to me.

When you travel, you must do so with no expectations. If you are planning to travel and place in your mind a seed of thought in which you expect a huge, wise oak tree to grow and change every bit of hardwire in your head, then there’s no need to travel at all.

You have already gained the knowledge that you need to change. If you go in knowing exactly what you want to be fixed, nothing will change. You already know the issue. You don’t need travel.

Travel should reveal, travel should teach, travel should be an experience had. None of these comes from intense anticipation.

When anticipation meets reality, it does not always equal greatness.

The four girls in the green Subaru wanted to come back differently than they had left, and with all this said, they did.

It wasn’t exactly in the way they carefully painted in their minds two and a half weeks prior, but travel, forces upon self-realization in some way. It could be small or it could be huge.

In our case, it helped to shatter any romanticizing of life events we fell short to. It was different for each of us, but the trip into the west was still one of the greatest times of my entire 19 years so far.

We got to see true goodness from so many new people we met along the way, we were truly independent for the first time in our lives, we got to personally witness the unfathomable beauty that lies beyond the corn of Illinois, we conquered our fears and we laughed enough to extend our lives a good five years.

If I could go back and shatter my illusions early, would I?

No. I share this knowledge for those who have yet to venture for themselves, so they can get the most out of every experience in life. But if I didn’t have that experience, I wouldn’t have this knowledge. I wouldn’t know how to truly experience future opportunities I have in life.

Now those four girls in a green Subaru are tackling on the east, in completely new places in our lives, more complicated or less than the year prior, and we’re still excited beyond belief to now be the rocks on the shore.