part-2
Two summers ago I went on a road trip with three friends — we drove up into the highland region of our country, and it turned out to be one of those trips that actually changes how you think about travelling. It was the first one I'd ever put together myself, and I had no idea what I was doing.
We drove from the city up into the mountains — about eighteen hours by road, maybe a bit more because we kept stopping. We had no fixed itinerary, just a rough route marked on someone's phone and a tent that none of us had actually tested before. What made it memorable wasn't any single moment but the whole feeling of being on the road for ten days with people I completely trusted. We argued over music, took turns driving through thick fog at four in the morning, ate at tiny roadside stalls where we didn't always know what we were ordering, and slept under skies I didn't know could look like that.
What I came away with was a different idea of what travel actually is. Before that trip, I always assumed a holiday meant a hotel, a plan, tourist spots. But this taught me that the best parts of any journey tend to be the unplanned ones — getting stuck behind a landslide for two hours, being waved over by a family who insisted we have tea, watching a mountain ridge turn gold just after sunrise. Even now, whenever I plan a trip, I deliberately leave gaps in the schedule, because that's where the real memories seem to come from.