Bored and blurry road trip photo by Catherine Dwyer ’14

Everyone knows that the unhappy people create the best art. That’s why we made our whole staff drive home for Thanksgiving. Nothing makes cheerful writers more unhappy (and therefor productive) than being forced to sit in a moving vehicle for 6+ hours! To further elicit their bad humor, we told our staff to write about their experiences and gave them a pressing deadline for the assignment. Ha ha, just kidding, we did not force staff members to drive home for break, but we did ask those who drove home to submit road trip summaries. Read the art that our writer’s suffering produced after the jump.

First, a road trip report from Executive Editor Havid Doyt, ahem, we mean David Hoyt ’14. David drove from Gambier to Pawling, New York. Here is what he recalls from his travels:

There are surprisingly few places to eat along I-80 in central Pennsylvania, but when you and your roommate are driving for 10 straight hours between Gambier and upstate New York, you’re going to have to stop somewhere. We opted for Denny’s over McDonald’s, because I’d never been to one and it seemed somehow to be more “road-trippy.” And Denny’s is almost as fast as fast food, right? No. The restaurant, attached to a truck stop, was full of men with strange beards and families with small children in tow. I guess since there was nothing else around, Denny’s was very busy, and it took forever for my meatball sub and my roommate’s “Moons Over My-Hammy” sandwich to arrive. The waitresses, all of whom had forearm tattoos, kept our coffee warm, but managed to slosh it all over our table when pouring. When the food eventually arrived, it was fine, except my roommate’s grits (which I made him order so he’d know what grits were like) were not very good. Adding a lot of butter helped a little. Moral of the story: don’t order grits in Pennsylvania.

Intern Jack Quigely ’16, who drove from Gambier to Wilmette, Illinois, reports that:

The drives were somewhat uneventful. There was almost no traffic, one of the best parts was when we pulled into Chipotle and saw this (see below) next door. Also, when switching drivers, the next driver was joking about how she gets into accidents all the time, and then she put the car into reverse and backed straight up the curb.

Daily Editor Kate Lindsay ’15 spins a long and harrowing yarn about her journey from Gambier to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with a stop in Washington D.C. on the way:

Our trip started out like any other. Meredith Bentson ’15, Maddy Jacobs ’15, Grant Carney ’15, and myself (…’15) piled our stuff into a car in a painstaking and possibly illegal way before all squeezing in and setting off. Within the first hour, a family dynamic had quickly developed. Bentsen was cast as the cynical mother, Jacobs and myself as the forever optimistic children, and Carney as the confused older uncle struggling to understand the difference between live-tweeting and regular tweeting. Things were cheery at first, the dulcet tones of Vanessa Carlton’s “1000 Miles” propelling us forward in our seven-hour journey.  Then, we pulled over to get gas and saw that inside the station was an “Ice Cream Shoppe” (Am I the only one who’s bothered by stores that do this kind of thing? Who are they trying to fool? You’re a gas station. Own it). Here we were met with an angry gas station employee who, when asked if she could make us a milkshake, reacted as if we had just asked her to go milk a cow herself instead.

This ended up being our last meal of the trip. As the night got darker and our stomachs got louder, food became harder to find. Every sign for food ended up leading us into a bleak and barren town, with empty roads that stretched for miles in both directions. When our search for a supposed Chick-Fil-A led us to a mall parking lot next to a Sears, we decided to bag our search and focus on getting home, as my ETA crawled closer and closer to 1:00 a.m.

The trip did not get any better. We passed a Sodexo building, dodged a fleet of army trucks, and listened to “Some Nights” by Fun. no fewer than six times.

There were some highlights, however. We possibly won fifteen dollars in the lottery (maybe), got a hashtag trending on Twitter, and heard “Mmm Bop” on the radio, taking us back to a time when people actually used radios.

There is always a light at the end of the tunnel, a silver lining to every cloud. When I finally stumbled into my house, relearning how to walk, I found my bed freshly stocked with a plethora of new and large pillows. I collapsed, feeling lucky to have survived. Shout-out to Maddy’s driving goes here. Goodnight.