The five-dollar trip to nowhere

Driving over the hill into Jones Valley the other day, I chuckled remembering that in high school, Charles and I used to call the section of road I was on “Hell.” We named it that because we drove down there one night when it was really foggy. You couldn’t see anything but the streetlights, and the road maybe 100 feet in front of the car. That was it. If you were trying to come up with a visual for “driving into the hoary underworld,” you could have done much worse.

Why were we going down there? No reason. We rarely had any reason to go anywhere when we’d take these trips. Oh sure, sometimes we went bowling, or to the movies. But a solid percentage of the time, we’d drive 50 to 100 miles in a night with no particular destination. We’d talk and listen to music, but we could have done that in one of our bedrooms, too. What we couldn’t do in our bedrooms was be out.

(And it certainly wasn’t like we had a lot of girl-related activity to consume our respective calendars, unless talking about them endlessly on our junkets to nowhere counts.)

That gasoline was under $1/gallon was certainly an enabler as well. “Five bucks’ worth” these days is a couple of commutes, not an evening of motoring. I suspect there is probably more purpose, more of the time, to kids’ car trips these days.

But then, I’m not sure how common our model of “cruising” was even back in the day. Our peers would often sit in parking lots together, or drive round and round the same space. (The parking lot at The Mall was huge for this for a couple of years, if you can believe it.) But just go? Like, Hughes, to University, to the Parkway, to Airport, to Whitesburg, to Drake, to Triana, to Governors, to 20, to Slaughter, to Madison Pike, to Cambridge, to Shelton, then to 20 again, then eat at McDonald’s or Arby’s in Madison and go home?

I was going to ask if kids still did that, but did anyone but us do it even back then?

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2 thoughts on “The five-dollar trip to nowhere”

  1. We drove all over creation like that in the 80s. Go to Danvers for fries, then out to candlewood park to cruise, then maybe over Clinton way or the reservoir, then back to town, maybe a stop for a shake, go visit the guys getting off their grocery jobs at 11, then home.

    Yep.

    Reply
  2. My gang did it too. We lived in Madison. “The city” was Huntsville and we couldn’t wait to explore wherever the roads would take us. These days, I complain if I have to get much further east than madison square mall.

    Reply

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