The summer before his freshman year at Union, senior marketing major Braden Donnell decided he was ready to take his first trip as an adult and convinced his friend, Eli Parker, to accompany him. After some discussion about what they wanted to do and see, it was decided they would travel to Niagara Falls, a 17-hour car ride from their hometown of Jackson, Tennessee.
So, the road trip preparation began — or rather, the lack of preparation.
“We loaded up his mom’s Honda Accord, got a cooler, and a bunch of random gear and groceries that our moms bought us and set off,” said Donnell.
Donnell recalls how different traveling without his parents for the first time was. Neither he nor Parker had ever been so far away from their families and the security they had always provided.
“We really were just figuring things out along the way. Trying to figure out where to park and all these small logistics that you didn’t consider as much when you’re with your parents. You are the decision-maker, you’re the person who is going to have to make all those calls.”
The pair traveled 10 hours the first day and decided to stay the night in Ohio. The trip was a last-minute plan, and since both Donnell and Parker were college students, the budget for the six-day trip was $215 each. On such a meager budget and with last-minute planning, the places available to stay were….interesting, to say the least.
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“The first place we stayed was a hostel,” Donnell remembers. “If you don’t know, a hostel is where you can rent either one room, or even just a bed in a room with access to bathrooms. It is a very affordable way to go.”
They met many interesting people over the 6 days, but one lady they met really stood out to them.
“This really interesting lady was staying at the hostel because she was competing in the roller derby competition that was happening in town. I’m not going to lie, she looked like she could have beaten both of us up,” he said.
Once Donnell and Parker began to speak to the woman, they came to find out just how incredibly sweet and kind she was. They were able to ask her questions about roller derby, learning about a sport they knew little about, and also made a friend they otherwise would never have met.
Donnell thinks of this as a lesson: “It’s experiences like that, where you might make an assumption about someone and then they just completely surprise you, that help you to see that you simply cannot judge a book by its cover.”
The experience of traveling so far from home with really no idea what they were doing reminded him of a movie from his childhood.
“I would honestly compare this experience to the movie ‘The Lion King’,” he said, laughing.
“It’s that whole thing where Simba ends up far away from his family in a place that is super unfamiliar, but then he makes new friends and learns to eat grubs and stuff like that,” said Donnell. “When Simba is all grown up and he comes back home, he has a lot more experiences in the world and he is able to lead his tribe better than he would have if he had never left. I am just glad my learning experience didn’t include eating grubs.”
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After arriving at Niagara Falls, both Donnell and Parker were amazed at the sheer vastness.
“It was definitely one of the coolest experiences,” said Parker.
Niagara Falls is on the border between the United States and Canada, and Donnell and Parker were excited about visiting Canada for the first time. Unfortunately, they forgot their passports and were not able to cross the border.
“I’ve seen Canada, but never been there,” Donnell said. “We were pretty upset when we realized we had forgotten our passports.”
After leaving the falls, Donnell and Parker stayed at an Airbnb. This experience proved to be just as unique.
“We stayed with a family that had moved to the United States from the Middle East. When we walked in the whole house smelled like spices and you could just tell this was a completely different culture than we had ever experienced. We stayed in their bunk room, and I can honestly say that was the best we slept on the entire trip,” Donnell recalls, fondly.
Donnell and Parker woke up the next day and traveled back down to Shenandoah National Park to do a 27-mile backpacking hike Donnell had planned.
“Yeah we learned a lot from that hike,” he said. “I had miscalculated how cold it was going to get that night. We only brought hammocks and then a really light fleece blanket, and it ended up getting down to 45 degrees with a lot of wind. We had to settle down without finding our backpacking campsite because it was getting too dark to see. We were just not prepared. It was a very cold, shivering night. We were really glad to see the sun come up.”
Donnell felt very humbled by the experience and learned to rely on the Lord.
“There was no way to contact anyone because we didn’t have cell service,” said Donnell. “If one of us had fallen and broken a leg, we would have just had to rely on each other and that the Lord has got us.”
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While this road trip seems like it was stressful at times, with many things going wrong, I can see the value in going on a trip like this as a young adult. Making decisions and having to rely on the Lord is a growing experience—one that I’m sure will have lessons you can lean on for a lifetime.
“I think everyone should take one of these trips,” said Donnell. “It doesn’t have to be just crazy far, but getting farther out of your comfort zone where you’re with people that you’ve never met, and you are just making decisions the best you can as you’re going. That’s really what it feels like to be an adult.”