In the end of summer 2024, my sister and I went on a three week road trip along the east coast of America. We visited Western Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida. This picture is from one of our favorite trails, Old Rag, a popular trail in Shenandoah National Park. We spent weeks visiting popular cities, national parks, and hiking popular trails, and camped or stayed in motels. We had decided to go on the trip as my sister was leaving for college at the end of the summer and I was leaving to move to Italy for the upcoming months. It was a rather impulsive decision and so we relied heavily on ourselves to navigate the logistics of the trip. We had no real itinerary nor accommodations, but had our car and knew we could figure it out. We started off in western Maryland at Rocky Gap State Park, a place we were both familiar with, as we had been camping there before. We stayed there for a day and went paddle boarding and hiking, and decided to drive further to West Virginia, where we found a motel on our way there. We continued this pattern, of staying in cities and places until we decided where-to next, and found accommodations while we were on the road.
Although this impulsive and unstructured trip gave us a lot of freedom, we also ran into a lot of issues along the way. At the time they were stressful, but looking back they made me a much more confident traveler. There were two instances where our phones had died and we had to rely on the help of park rangers to finish the trails or make it back to camp, we had areas with no service so we were unable for find accommodation on our phones or use our GPS (leading us to drive aimlessly until we got a bar of WiFi), and times where it was already late at night but there were no available campsites/motel rooms for miles ahead (further leading us to sleep in our car at a rest stop). Although this trip was impulsive and caused us to run into a few issues, each one of these obstacles made me much more self-reliant. I had to rely on my own ability to problem solve to make it from state to state, and made me so much more confident in traveling on my own. This experience taught me to better respond to problems, learning to adapt and rely on the resources that are available to me. This trip definitely pushed me out of my comfort zone, but also showed me how traveling is not a smooth road, but it is in my control how I deal with each situation. Also- each one of the issues which seemed so large at the time, ended up being the best stories after we got back home.