Prelude to my First Full Fledged Road Trip

This week I am touching on the first time I took a road trip down to Florida with a group of friends.  This trip marked the birth of our Binders.  Spring break was coming up and it was my freshman year and I had no plans or ideas of what to do.  A few of my friends had girlfriends who would not let them get away with traveling to a college hot spot during my break.  A few days before the official vacation started I met with three friends and we schemed a plan where we could all get away for the week. 

            We labeled it as a fishing trip and we did make an effort to fish for about two hours of the trip although that was definitely not the main idea.  We drove my newly acquired Ford Focus with five boxes of pizza as we embarked on the painful drive down south.  The drive was filled with many speeding tickets and a few eventful stops but I remember driving the graveyard shift and being surrounded by a slew of 18- wheelers and all of a sudden the car was surrounded by smoke and the smell of burned rubber.  I was driving fast but was afraid to slow down to a sensible speed because I knew the car was still surrounded by trucks as it was impossible to see and was getting pelt with huge chunks of rubber.  A tire somewhere ahead of us exploded and caused up quite a stir on the road.  I remember everyone in the car waking up and collectively yelled in unison about what was about to happen.  Then we saw it, I remember it like it happened in slow motion.  A half of a monstrous exploded tire was up in the air and came smashing down on my windshield cracking it in a few directions across to middle.  There was still no time to stop as I kept driving- we had places to be.

            The plan was to start off in Ft. Lauderdale and plan the rest of the trip by ear.  My Aunt has an apartment there and we used that as our starting of point on a trip that would take us down to Miami and South Beach, through the keys and off to Key West, then we finished up the trip on Easter Sunday in Ft Lauderdale.

            The events that followed in the next couple of days included times and moments we would never forget for obvious reasons.  The Friday and Saturday nights of our trip left us battered, beat up, and separated without a hotel or place to go in what resulted as an Easter morning that resembled The Hangover years before it was even released.

(first night in Key West on top of the Focus Resort (my car))

(somethings going down)

(???)