How to Be Awesome: Road Trip Edition

By Contributor

August 24, 2010

jgrudzy is so awesome, she'll probably get kicked out of college. Just kidding!!! —Sparkitors

I am almost certain that road trips are essential to being awesome. Luckily, I was raised on road trips and am therefore inherently awesome. Since you may not have had the benefit of that experience, I have compiled the following tips for making your road trip awesome:
1. Size doesn't matter. You know that saying about no small parts, only small actors? Well, apply that to your road trip. You don't have to drive all the way to Greenland and back to have an awesome road trip. In fact, shorter can be sweeter (less gas money). So, make every car trip a road trip; every drive to the grocery store, every bus ride to school, every trip around the Go-Kart track—they all count. However, you should probably talk about them as if they were extremely long. It's more impressive.

2. Take pictures. Every awesome road trip should be well-documented, no matter who you travel with. Take pictures of your kid sister picking her nose, your best friend head banging to Justin Bieber, your mom gripping the emergency brake in fright while you drive; EVERYTHING is a photo opportunity. Why? Because one day, you will be famous. And then you can sell pictures of your childhood under a pseudonym and become extremely, fabulously wealthy.

3. Choose good music. Playing the right music at the right time is vital to your road trip. Play screamo music as you leave home, pop during the middle of the trip, when you're feeling silly, and slow music on the way home (slow music will make the drive seem longer and the good times seem endless). Sometime in the middle (preferably at night), you should leave time for rap music and fist-pumping.

4. Witness explosions. Yes, I know I've touched on this before. That does not make it less important now. You know all those cool action movies? The ones where the hero/ine speeds away from some mushroom-cloud explosion? Yeah, you need to be by that. How do you find an explosion? Move to Hollywood. Or look for a group of angry teenagers playing with bottle rockets in an open field. That'll do. But remember: awesome people make explosions, they do not explode themselves.

5. Know when to quit. Probably a better point here would be “know when to kick your passengers out of the car.” Remember that the driver has say over who rides, so when your best friend starts whining about needing a rest stop, just shove him/her out. And when your dad complains that your trip to the grocery store is taking a really, really long time, leave him stranded on the highway. Or, alternatively, realize that it is time to bring your trip to an end, and head on home to clean up that garage.

Have you ever had a successful road trip?