No one tells you this when you’re young, but the best roads don’t lead anywhere good. They lead to dead ends. To cracked motel lots lit by buzzing neon. To bars without names and bathrooms without locks. They lead you past your expectations, past your carefully optimized travel plans, past the version of yourself who thought they could read the signs.
The road doesn’t love you. It doesn’t care about your manifestos or your mileage points. The road spits you out where it wants to. Some nights, that’s a beach town with warm beer and cold showers and a girl you’ll only know as “M.” Other nights, it’s a truck stop with a vending machine full of off-brand cigarettes and a man named Leonard who claims to have once met Keith Richards, but probably didn’t.
You tell yourself you’re looking for something — clarity, maybe, or freedom — but the truth is you’re just following bad instincts with good shoes. The GPS failed three turns ago. Your phone’s dead. The map got wet, then torn, then lost. All you’ve got left is your own reckless momentum and a growing tolerance for disappointment.
But here’s the secret: disappointment is where it starts to get interesting. Comfort never wrote a good story. No one wants to hear about the hotel that had perfect WiFi and complimentary espresso. We want to hear about the time you got stranded outside Sarajevo and shared a bottle of plum brandy with a farmer who thought you were Finnish. About the border crossing that didn’t go to plan. About the bus that broke down in the mountains and how you hitched a ride in the back of a goat truck and didn’t speak for twelve hours because no one spoke back.
Those are the stories worth telling. The ones born from detours, not destinations. From plans gone sideways and instincts gone wrong. From the slow realization that you can’t outrun yourself, but you can sure as hell outdrink your expectations.
Somewhere worse isn’t really worse. It’s just unfamiliar. Uncomfortable. Unscheduled. It’s the kind of place where you stop checking the time and start counting bruises, where the only directions you trust come from people missing teeth. Somewhere worse is where the fear burns off and the curiosity kicks in. It’s where you remember how to laugh at yourself again.
If you’re lucky, you won’t make it home for a while. If you’re really lucky, you won’t want to.
Because eventually you learn: the road didn’t take you there.
Your terrible instincts did.
And thank god for that.
