Yesterday, I made the usual road trip from my college town to my hometown for the second week of my spring break. Since my hometown lies on the rural Olympic Peninsula, where hardly anyone else from my school lives, this trip is always a complex one. First, I get a ride with someone who lives in Seattle (which is very easy to do with the Whitman student population). Then, I take a half-hour ferry ride to Bainbridge Island. For some reason, I always get to Seattle right as the next ferry is expected to depart, so I’m either running frantically to get on, or as was the case yesterday, stepping out of the car only to see the ferry pull away from the dock, leaving me with another hour to kill in the ferry terminal. After the ferry, I have an hour-and-twenty-minute (roughly, depending on traffic) car ride until I finally get home.

Even though the last half of yesterday was more stressful than usual, I kept remarking to myself that the first half, the drive through Eastern Washington, was one of the nicest I’ve ever experienced because of the beautiful, clear weather. This got me thinking about all the times I’ve made this particular road trip, and I decided to do a piece on the experience of making the same drive repeatedly for years.

You start out excited for this familiar trip, looking forward to a bomb playlist and getting out of town.

At a certain point, you and your car-mates get tired of music and decide to put on some podcasts.

But then the stories get very real and/or very sad and you start having existential discussions in your mind about yourself, your country and society at large, while you gaze out the window.

You start noticing things that, surprisingly, you’ve never noticed before.

Was that villa and vineyard always there? Has that town always had 20 gas stations?

You gradually feel the need to pee coming on, and after berating yourself for drinking too much water, you start looking for the rest stop you always stop at.

You stop at a rest stop that you’re sure is the one you always stop at, only to feel disoriented when you realize that it’s not in fact the same rest stop, and you’ve been holding in your pee for nothing.

You try the water fountains at said rest stop, only to remember that they never work.

You reach the crest of the hill where you can see a beautiful mountain range come into view, and you feel a powerful swell of emotions, followed by a sense of relief that it’s no longer winter and you’re not heading into a mountain pass of hell.

You start thinking, OK, we have this much time left, cool. Until the same scenery keeps stretching on, and you remember that you always underestimate the time length of this stretch.

When you reach the city you think, "Wow, maybe we won’t have much traffic this time." And then you run into the traffic.

When you finally get home, you feel exhausted but relieved that it was one of the more relatively stress-free trips, and you start preparing yourself for the exact same trip in a week.