2006.

A decade. Freaky to think about. I was 26, and it's weird to think back and remember what I did, what was important. A bunch of my friends were starting to marry off, the second wave. The ones of us that weren't road tripped, which is what you do for fun- travel. My parents raised us with the belief that it wasn't a vacation unless you crossed state lines, and I have all the memories of a childhood spent in the backseat of an Oldsmobile 98, excited that we were on the way. But I digress.

2006 was the year that my sister and I drove down from Indianapolis to Orlando in a three day weekend to meet the creator of the Rockafire Explosion. It's most certainly something I do not recommend, and not just because my memory is missing chunks of our drive home, and my sister says she's missing the same pieces. We were crazy naive, and assumed that being young and strong would power our rented Chevy Lumina from an unknown year. (That car was seriously dangerous- there were a lot of things that looking back could've been bad, but worked out to an absurd degree.)
Let's see, the car didn't handle hills well, so we had to pray our way up and down Mount Eagle, we hit Atlanta at the wrong time (not really a good time to hit Atlanta, traffic wise) and we hit Saturday before we crossed the Florida state line. We weren't cussers then, but that would've been the time to start. By the time we actually arrived at the  house, at butt-o-clock, there were roaming raccoons and we slept in the car.

But! Despite all that it was one of the best experiences of my life. My sister and I had went on all those road trips with groups of people. The closest we ever came to traveling by ourselves still involved staying with family. As fate would have it, I'd have a niece by the next year, so it stands alone as Our Big Sisterly Trip. It also marks the time when I thought to myself "I really can have adventures, I never thought I'd get to!" I call out my 'I got to' moments, because I still sometimes shake my head in disbelief over some of the stuff I've, well, gotten to do. I just knew from the first time I read about the glimmer of the idea of a tour down in Orlando, that it was something I had to do.