How about a weekend trip?

Idk, what do you think?

Sounds good to me.

Sounds good to me.

I'm down for whatever this weekend but I was thinking we should probably check out those cabins upstate because my cousin actually has one and she told me once that there's a lake nearby with these insane kayaks which sounds amazing, though to be honest the last time I went camping it rained for like three days straight and I ended up sleeping in the car eating cold sandwiches but anyway maybe we can just do something closer if everyone's busy.

Sounds great to me.

Oh yeah for sure I'd be down — actually this reminds me of that one time my cousin Mike decided we should go camping in Zion and he didn't realize how big a hike was because he watched some travel vlog with like 40 cuts per second where it just looked beautiful. We ended up on the trail for six hours straight and I had to eat an entire bag of beef jerky while sitting on a boulder looking at this canyon that was stunning but also terrifying in a way you can't really describe from a photo because the scale is insane — like everything feels small but also huge somehow and there were these tiny lizards just sunbathing right next to my boots which I found fascinating because they didn't seem bothered by me at all despite being inches away. Anyway yeah trips are great, especially with good company even when things get complicated.

Oh yeah I love trips and my cousin used to take me everywhere when we were kids and he had this old jeep that would barely start every morning but somehow it always made it because there was something about his dedication to exploring that really stuck with me and actually the trip for next weekend has been on the books for a while now since I saw this post last year maybe and we're thinking of heading up north where my grandparents had a cabin but honestly everything changed after the summer at lake champlain when my neighbor asked me about his fishing license situation which turned into a three-hour conversation about ecology and conservation and I ended up buying him five different types of lures because he couldn't decide what he wanted to catch even though we were just standing in his driveway between 4:00 and 7:00 PM on a Tuesday.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how weekends used to feel different before everything became so scheduled and hyper-optimized — you know, like people posting elaborate itineraries for forty-eight hours as if it were a military operation. I actually had this weekend in Asheville two years ago where we drove up there with nothing planned at all, just gas in the tank and each other's company, which ended up being the most refreshing trip of my life because everything happened organically rather than by design. There was this creek behind one of the cabins that ran crystal clear through a hemlock grove and I remember sitting on that bank for what felt like hours just watching the water move over mossy stones while listening to the sound of cicadas in the high summer heat, which is funny because it reminded me so much of summers at my grandmother's house where she had this old screen door that rattled every time someone walked past and she used to say that noise was the soundtrack of a life well-lived. I wonder if we lose something when everything has to be planned — maybe spontaneity is undervalued in our planning culture, but honestly it could also just be that people are anxious about wasting time which I totally get because there's always so much on your plate and you want to make every hour count.

A weekend trip sounds great right now because I haven't left my apartment in what feels like forever and honestly there is something about that feeling of just packing a bag and leaving without any real plan that makes me feel alive again — reminds me of this one time in college when we drove east for three days with no hotel booked and no food saved on the phone and ended up sleeping in the back of my friend's old truck under the stars near Lake Michigan. I can still smell the pine needles and hear the wind through the trees and it was probably the most freeing experience I had during that entire year because everything felt possible when you didn't know where you were going to sleep that night or what you were eating for breakfast. That kind of spontaneity is rare now with everyone planning every minute in advance but if we can find something like that — just a long drive and no set itinerary — it would be perfect.