LIFESTYLE: Road Tripping

Braving everything from floods to the stench of wild hogs, students on road trips have seen it all In the dim light of a convenience store parking lot in the middle of nowhere, two young men strain to read the faint lines of a slightly crumpled road map spread over the dashboard. It is 4 a.m., and for the past 10 hours they have seen nothing but cornfields and the smooth tar of two-lane highways that seem to run on forever. The nearest city is miles away, and it has an unusual name like Santa Claus or Jupiter or Monkey's Eyebrow. Are these men truck drivers weathered by interstate signs and all-night diners? Travelling salesmen? The adventurous, coffee-slurping beatnik types featured in books like Jack Kerouac's On The Road? Or, if they are like many at the University, the travelers are simply part of a growing number of college students who believe that learning about real life requires venturing at times thousands of miles away from the classroom. From the stench of wild hogs in Iowa farmlands to the overwhelming glitter of Las Vegas, College senior Dave Kury said he learned more about America while driving his older brother Steven Kury to graduate school at the California Institute of the Arts this summer than he did at the University. In an un-air conditioned 1984 Ford Taurus, the younger Kury drove stick-shift for the first time in his life over even midwestern highways. "I felt so trapped being in the middle of nowhere," he said. "America has a very flat feel -- you get so sick of seeing corn." Both Kury and his older brother took a break from driving, though, when they got a flat tire in Colorado. "We got towed through the Rockies," the younger Kury said. "It was a great way to see the sites. The person who drove us over the Rockies was nice -- I think he was from Aspen." The other locals Kury met, however, seemed like they had popped right out of a low-budget movie or television show. "There were big, fat, drunk truck drivers, waitresses like Flo from Mel's Diner [and] cowboys," he said. "It was the weirdest collection of people -- a lot of tobacco-chewing people with shotguns in the back of their car and that sort of thing." As they drove further and further west, Kury said he grew more amazed by the changing landscape. "Las Vegas was really awesome. You're driving in the middle of nowhere and all of the sudden there's this huge city," he said. "Caesar's Palace, and a huge pyramid coming out of no place, and there was this dragon spitting fire. I saw the weirdest things." But Kury said he experienced the most culture shock when he and his brother came closer to their destination. "In [Los Angeles], there's astroturf instead of grass in the highway [islands]," he said. "It's a very superficial place." Although Kury said he enjoyed his cross country adventure -- particularly because he got to spend so much time with his brother -- he said the road trip did not exactly foster a love for America's heartland. "I am definitely an East Coast kind of person," he said. "I think Philadelphia's kind of grown on me." There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but there's also no such thing as an all-you-can-eat buffet. At least, that is what College senior Mike Zugay said he learned when he drove cross country to San Antonio, Texas for spring break. After an entire day of driving without stopping for food, Zugay and the four other passengers in his friend's Chevrolet Wagoneer stopped at a pizza parlor in Arkadelphia, Ark. which advertised an unlimited buffet, he said. When the management of the restaurant saw the five students rapidly consume pizza after pizza without any signs of stopping, they promptly but "politely" asked them to leave. "Here you have five guys who haven't eaten all day," Zugay said. "And they threw us out. [But] they were polite. Most people in the South are polite." Zugay added that a similar incident happened to the travelers on their ride home at a Ponderosa restaurant in Indiana. At an all-you-can-eat steak and shrimp buffet, the students hurriedly gorged themselves to the point of flustering both the waiters and the management. "[The waitress] couldn't get it out fast enough," Zugay said. "They didn't take to well to us eating their entire brunch while people were coming in from church in their Sunday clothes." Along with offending restaurant employees in different regions of the country, Zugay and his friends also managed to anger a "six foot three, 250 pound" Texas state trooper. Somewhere near the border of Texarkana, they were pulled over for driving 80 miles per hour in a 60 miles per hour zone. The burly police officer asked to see the vehicle registration. But sitting in the passenger seat was an even larger 350 pound student -- 1994 Engineering graduate Duke Schnolis -- who was unable to reach the glove compartment containing the registration because of his size, Zugay said. To get to the compartment, Schnolis had to step out of the Wagoneer, thus frightening and angering the officer. Later, in St. Louis, the travelling team encountered even more hostility -- but this time it was from "a little old lady tried to run us off the road." Zugay said one of his friends was hanging out of the van with his camera, trying to take a picture of the Gateway Arch. "Someone was trying to drive us off the road, and we looked and it was this little old lady hunched over the wheel," he said. "She almost killed him. But he got a picture anyway." But even a vacation filled with hostile waitresses, state troopers and sadistic drivers did not keep Zugay from enjoying himself. "That was the most fun I ever had on spring break," he said. "I love road tripping." College senior Liza Horne also said she had a great time driving to Miami last spring break -- although her trip, too, was fraught with misadventure. When Horne and her two companions reached their first destination -- a friend's beach house in Nags Head, N.C. -- they thought they would be able to relax for the night after a long day of driving. When the travellers went to wash up for bed, though, they received an unwelcome surprise. "The whole house flooded on us," she said. "Everything was flooded -- the bathrooms, the kitchen, everything." The next day, Horne's travel plans continued to unravel when she realized she had completely miscalculated the number of miles between Nags Head and Atlanta, the locale where Horne had hoped to spend the night at her uncle's house. When the students passed the South Carolina border into Georgia, she stopped called her uncle and told him she would be over for dinner in an hour. Horne said he laughed when she told him this -- because they were actually on the opposite end of the state, hundreds of miles away. So, Horne and her friends had to settle for a seafood dinner at Shoney's Restaurant near Savannah, where they experienced a type of culture shock similar to Zugay's. "[1993 Wharton graduate Frances Mataac] started telling this really loud story with a lot of profanity about the first time he got his friend drunk," she said. Horne said when Mataac got to the part about his friend's run-in with a prostitute, "Frances said, 'And he stuck his [penis] through a fence' and then the whole restaurant was completely silent." "The family next to us was just appalled, and all of the noise stopped," she said. "All eyes were on us." Horne added, though, that they were not thrown out of Shoney's -- much to her surprise. Mataac caused more problems for the trio on the ride back when he got caught speeding at about 100 miles per hour in northern Florida. They, too, were pulled over by a "huge, 250 pound" police officer, Horne said -- although she did not know if it was the same one who had stopped Zugay's Wagoneer in Texarkana. Despite this setback, Horne said she is glad they opted to drive -- rather than fly -- to Miami. "The Chesapeake Bay Bridge is just the most beautiful sight," she said. "You just can't see that from a plane." But Engineering junior Penh Beidler decided to forego any possible car troubles and go Greyhound when he and Engineering senior Amir Haq took a 28-hour bus trip from Tuscon, Arizona to Hermasillo, Mexico. "All of the worry of driving a car isn't worth it," said Beidler, who added that he was able to enjoy the landscape of northern Mexico from the large panel windows of an air conditioned vehicle. "[The bus] was uncomfortable but much more intelligent," he said. "If you go by car, you also have to find out where to park." Without car hassles, Beidler said he and Haq had a very good time south of the border. "We tended to stay away from tourist parts of the city," he said. "We were going to experience Mexican culture." Although at a bus stop at the border, Beidler was almost cheated out of 50 pesos, in general he said he found the people to be very nice. "I didn't speak much Spanish and nobody understood me," he said. "[But] at a fruit-drink stand there was this guy buying stuff and he helped us there. "He drove us all the way to a hotel, and he didn't try to rob us or anything," Beidler added.