Bloggers Mark McPhillips, ‘20 and Daniella Maney, ‘20 embarked on a road trip this summer with their friend Samuel Piller, ‘20 before coming back to Conn. This is the final post in a series of pieces about what they experienced along the way.... (Read Post 1)

I spent the last day of the road trip alone in Samuel’s house in Virginia. Samuel left with his family in the morning to visit his grandma in Illinois and as soon as I woke up I drove Dani to the airport so she could fly back to Massachusetts.

After I dropped Dani off at the airport, I drove back to Samuel’s house and stopped at a Starbucks along the way. I also incidentally stopped in a shopping center, because I took a wrong turn and got a little lost. It was interesting to see the different kinds of architecture and store layout in a shopping center in Virginia compared to the New Jersey shore outlets that I am used to.

I spent the rest of my day just hanging out at Samuel’s house and doing some reflection on the wild past two weeks. They flew by. I was very taken aback when I considered the grand plan of the whole trip: we started in New Jersey and drove all the way through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri to get to Kansas and then through Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee to finally get to Virginia. It was an incredible trip with memories, experiences and good times—something that I will cherish forever.

The rest of my day at Samuel’s house was spent watching the newly released “Wet Hot American Summer” show on Netflix, and then watching a Netflix original film, “The Fundamentals of Caring.” I wound up going to sleep early because, while my journey home was not going to be a long one, I had to be at the Charlottesville, Virginia, Amtrak station at 8:30 a.m.

I went to sleep that night with fond memories of the road trip floating through my mind and a smile on my face. I thought back to the very first time the three of us conceived this road trip while exploring the Arboretum in between classes at Conn. We weren’t even sure then that it would happen.