One of my best friends from UNH transferred to West Virginia last year to play football at WVU. Myself, my friend Olivia (who dates Zo- who we went to visit), Shae, and Owen decided instead of going home for Columbus Day, that we were going to make the 11 hour drive to West Virginia University. Of course, we could not leave Thursday to start our drive, we had to wait until Friday, after Olivia got back on campus from clinical around four in the afternoon. But to put a cherry on the top, Owen, thought it was a smart idea to start his four loads of laundry two hours before we were supposed to leave, and yes, he had to bring the clothes he was washing to West Virginia! Finally after his laundry was finished, we lugged all four of our bags down to Olivia’s car and squeezed everything into her trunk. We made Owen air dry his jeans in the car because we did not want to wait any longer, so we ended up leaving around five.
Relieved we finally made it into the car, I was the first person out of us on driving duty. Shae and I hopped into the front seats, finally typed in West Virginia University into the Waze app, and departed from UNH. Great! Estimated time increased to 12 hours, little did we know it was going to take us almost 14 hours to get there. We start driving and pretty much getting sick of each other the first 20 minutes in the car. Well Shae, who is weirdly obsessed with murder podcasts decided it was an appropriate time to put a podcast on. All of us actually got pretty invested into the episode and time passed by semi-quick until it started to rain and on top of that we hit bumper to bumper traffic around Worcester, MA. I started to get flustered because Olivia’s windshield wipers were terrible and the rain was really coming down. After I drove for around three hours, we all decided to take a break and grab some food. We stopped at one of the rest stops off the highway that had a bunch of fast food places. We all ate, went to the bathroom, and sat down for a little.
Next driver was Olivia, so Shae and I moved to the back and Liv and Owen moved to the front. Of course it stopped raining when Liv started to drive and the traffic was gone because it was around nine at night. We all kept reminding each other how many hours we had left, at this point is was eight hours, and we were still optimistic. Olivia had a relatively easy drive but she refused to drive through New York specifically over the Tappan Zee Bridge, so right before we were about to go over it, Shae and Olivia switched places for driving. Again we all changed where we were sitting and Shae and I were back in the front and Olivia and Owen were back in the back seats.
Poor Shae, she had to drive through all the two lane highway parts that all happened to be under construction. This was probably the beginning of the worst part of the drive because it was so dark out and there were barely any lights shining on the highway. On top of Shae having to drive through the narrow construction highway roads, there were deer everywhere. And to make it even more stressful, of course during her time all of the tractor trailer trucks were on the roads so we would be driving in these narrow lanes and a big truck would be right alongside us. You could tell how tense Shae was when she was driving and I felt bad for her but I tried keeping her entertained because we were driving so late. Shae finally had enough and wanted to switch with Olivia but we were in the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania so there were barely any exits off the highway. When we finally found one, Shae turned off of it and to make things even worse, there were zero streetlights and the road looked like somewhere people would kidnap you. We quickly turned around, and went back onto the highway. About thirty miles down the road we found a slightly more civilized looking area to stop which is where we ended up at one of the scariest gas stations I have ever been to.
At this point of the trip it was around one in the morning. We were all in need of a Red Bull as well as a bathroom break. When we arrived at the gas station, it almost looked like it was not even functioning. The gas pumps were old, the building looked like it was falling down and there were Bible verses on the side of the building. Some little old lady greeted us at the door because of course you had to pay inside (even if you were using a card). Shortly as we were leaving the “sheriff” of tbeh town, I am assuming, pulled up in a beaten down truck that was carrying what looked like a very old horse trailer. Olivia made all four of us wait outside of the car while she pumped the gas because we were all so scared. We quickly jumped back in the car and once again we were back on the roads.
Olivia ended up driving the rest of the way which was about four more hours. This part of our trip was filled with deer. We would get notified from the app we were using “roadkill ahead” every other minute. We actually had to slam on the breaks multiple times to avoid the roadkill. It was not just roadkill either, deer were everywhere, it seemed like their favorite place to be was in the breakdown lanes along the highway waiting to run in front of us. Thank god we made it past all the deer but we did have to come to a complete stop because a deer was about to jump in front of our car.
At this point of our trip, we were approaching four in the morning. We were all becoming delirious and paranoid looking out for deer. We finally saw the sign “Welcome to West Virginia”, which was the most relieving sight ever. As we got closer to Morgantown, which is where West Virginia University is, the roads started to become very hilly. The town is pretty much built on a mountain. At about five in the morning, we made it to Zo’s apartment. We all were exhausted and ready for bed but we knew we were not going to get that much sleep because we had to be up early for the football game in the morning. The weekend was very fun but we were all running on little to no sleep. Overall, I went into the trip thinking that the road trip was going to be such a good memory and fun to look back on. We all decided we were never going to drive there again and that next time we go, we will fly.