My father has always fantasized about bringing me on trips around the country and world like he took himself as a young adult. There’s just one issue with his dreams, they always include camping and hiking. Camping’s alright, if you eliminate the mosquitos, the humid mornings, freezing cold nights that leave me shivering until 3 am, and the repetitive meal of hot dogs. Hiking is fun, at least when it’s not 114 degrees Fahrenheit in the blazing Arizona sun, as goes with when it’s not below zero degrees in two feet of snow in northern Minnesota’s winter season. Traveling with my father is a full-time job, waking up at 5 am and finally getting cozy in my bug-infested sleeping bag at the prime time of 11 pm. 

During the way-too-short spring break in my school year, my cousin, father, and I made a road trip to Florida. Florida, with beautiful palm trees and gentle ocean waves crashing down on the sand beneath your feet. I wish. My trip included Florida with miniscule bugs that get through screens and have the bite of a wolf spider the size of a silver dollar,  the constant fear of walking near grass above four inches long for worries of having my leg chomped by a ten-foot alligator, and a sunburn that makes it nearly impossible to tie my own shoes. 

At 2 am the first night, after driving for over eighteen hours with as many bathroom breaks as I have toes and fingers, we finally arrived at our first campground. Or that’s what the website said anyway, but no campground was in sight. Some emergency phone calls back up to HQ in Minnesota had led us to conclude that we were scammed and there was no campground to begin with. The side of the highway was our very humble abode that night. That night was awful, I started to regret asking to go to Florida deeply. Now I’m stuck in this foreign land for eight days with only the company of two men. 

The next few days went roughly the same, utterly miserable. By the fourth day of our adventure I was finally getting used to the situation, I wasn’t getting as tired on our eight-mile hikes, I wasn’t too scared to try Cuban food- amazing food by the way- and I was starting to get the hand at putting our tent together and set up in less than five minutes. The sunburn never went away, unfortunately. It was inspiring after realizing my body had gotten a significant amount stronger in such a short amount of time. I started to grow anxious to get home and to go for runs and start exercising, something I never actually wanted to do. 

After an excruciatingly long eight days, or so I originally thought. The trip wasn’t so terrible after all. The salty water was beyond beautiful, my even tan made me look healthy, and the memories are worth my whole net worth. Admittedly, the memories are worth a lot more than forty dollars. The whole trip, I was complaining constantly about all the minor inconveniences, but realistically, they weren’t even worth a bat of an eye. On our way back up to our homeland in Minnesota, I shocked my father by asking, “When’s our next adventure?”