Blog 45

To celebrate New Year’s Eve of 2011, I packed up my car for the night, grabbed my boyfriend, and we set out on a road trip across the Midwest.

The trip began as musings of a road trip to the south for the summer and grew increasingly more spontaneous as we realized that we didn’t want to wait that long to get away. He was stressed out about having a psycho roommate. I was stressed out about the family drama of Christmas.

We were short on money (what college student isn’t?), so decided to pick low budget attractions. First we headed west towards Wright-Patt air force base and visited the National Air force Museum. Admission was free. We spend over half a day wandering through the hangars and looking at the development of flight and air warfare. As nerdy as it was, we wondered at the Sopwith Camel and took turns explaining the engines.

After that, we ventured further westwards, making unplanned stops as we pleased. We watched the ball drop, dozed off, and were up and driving early the next morning. He navigated me towards ‘gravity hill’, which turned out to be a very un-noteworthy hill in Indiana that gave you the optical illusion of falling backwards when you stuck the car in neutral just over the apex of the hill. We laughed that we had wasted so many hours on finding a hill that really didn’t do anything.

After that, we quested for the Tulip Tressel Bridge, or the Richland Creek Viaduct in Greene County, Indiana. It’s the third largest bridge of its kind in the world and is over 100 years old. We called ourselves bridge enthusiasts and spent the day navigating backcountry roads in order to get a glimpse. It got dark before we could spot it and we did the long ride back to Columbus not at all disappointed.

The trip was important to me because it made me realize that I had grown up. It was empowering to know that I could jet off on a whim and spend time with someone that I love. No one could tell me know and I didn’t care a hoot what anyone thought about it.