I decided NOT to move from Tampa to San Diego and it changed my life
By: Jason Bowden
Tags: Adventure, Learning, Friends, Roadtrip, Travel

Photo by Katie Drazdauskaite on Unsplash

I was home from school, visiting my parents in between semesters. One day my good friend Patrick called and told me he’d bought a van and wanted to drive from Tampa to San Diego. “You should come with me” he said. Hell yeah, that sounds…shit, I have to go back to school. Thanks anyway homie.

I walk into my dad’s office and tell him Pat’s moving to San Diego and wants me to drive with him. He tells me to sit down and write out the pros and cons for each opportunity. I do the exercise and it’s overwhelmingly obvious: I’m going back to school. I have an apartment, roommates, a lease. I’ve already picked my classes next semester. Besides, Pat’s had a history of shitty cars, who knows if the van would even make it across the country? My dad motions toward the door and says, “okay, let’s go get your ticket” (this was a long time ago, there were actual human travel agents who procured flights for you).

We get in the car. It’s a long ride across town but we eventually pull the needlessly large, blue, dented 1985 Impala into the strip mall parking lot.

The travel agent office is a perfect square, with 8 or 10 people inside seated at uniformly aligned desks with oversized headsets on, their phones blinking with hopeful travelers waiting impatiently. My dad pulls the door open and makes an announcement: “this kid needs a ticket to Tampa!”

That was a single seminal moment that changed the course of my life. I was going to Florida. I was taking the risky option, the fun option, the option I actually wanted to take but was afraid to admit. At the last minute I was throwing the plan out the window and doing something completely different.

A couple days after I got there, Pat’s mom’s drunk boyfriend kicked us out of their house, effectively starting the trip a week before we were scheduled to go. We had a couple of friends flying in to join the adventure, and we still had tons of work to do on the the GIANT, roundish, dingy white utility van with a decorative bass line stripe on the side. We called it the “White October” and it was just as shitty as I expected. With days before we could leave, we had to find somewhere to stay. We ended up sleeping in the parking lot of a Super Wal-Mart. This was one of the worst case scenarios for me, but we lived through it (it was honestly sort of fun).

The rest of the trip was an amazing, once in a lifetime experience. From Tampa we drove down to Miami where our back passenger side wheel almost fell off. We listened to a “Color me Badd” cover band in Sarasota. The alternator stopped alternating in Pensacola and some dudes in a pickup pushed us at 50 miles per hour across a highway by the bumper (Joe turned to me and said, honestly, that we might die). We ate gas station hot dogs in Alabama, experienced Bourbon Street in Louisiana, drove 30 hours straight through Texas, visited old friends in Phoenix, drank too much in general, fought amongst ourselves, and had the absolute time of our lives. The van broke down many more times, finally succumbing to its shittiness just over the border from Arizona in the hills of California. Two of us got a ride from Border Patrol to the nearest town, slept on the floor of a motel lobby, took the 7:10 AM, multi-hour, motion sick bus ride to the next nearest town, rented a car, then hauled ass back to get the two poor souls who waited with all of our stuff in the van. We rolled into San Diego in a Dodge Intrepid piled high with everything the four of us owned.

As my dad obviously knew— I learned more about myself on that trip than I possibly could have in geology classes. I learned I could survive. That I didn’t need a plan and that I had the ability to adapt. I learned that the ideal outcome for a given situation may not be possible, and that’s okay. I learned that with good people around you, anything is doable no matter the obstacle.

I never made it back to school in Portland.