It takes six hours to drive all the way through Alabama. Six long hours spent worrying that our car would break down in bum-fuck nowhere and some backwoods hillbilly would jump out and go all ""The Hills Have Eyes"" on us. Every gas station looked like it caught fire 20 years ago and had been abandoned ever since, and there were more state patrol cars in each crap-hole town than there were people.
My friend and I made one pit stop to get gas in Alabama during our 18-hour drive to Panama City Beach for spring break, and it still proves to be the worst decision we made during the entire trip. Aside from the fact that every patron looked as though they'd been strung out on meth for three weeks, I dared to ask the cashier (whom I'm almost certain spoke very little of any language) for a pack of rolling papers. After a 10-minute ""conversation"" where I explained that I would like the brand called TOP and not the brand that's at the top of the shelf, the hag still gave me the wrong pack.
She even tried to give it to the only other woman in the gas station purchasing something, who declined, and then she yelled at me for still wanting to buy the papers. I wanted a cigarette, goddammit. Alabama made me do it. It's not a pleasant state.
While I felt as though I was using proper English and enunciating clearly and loudly, I almost felt the urge to start speaking with a thick, barely audible southern accent just to see if the drawl functions as some sort of second language that only the dumb use to communicate.
Two hours away from the border of Florida's panhandle and Alabama, my epic collection of music for the trip, entitled ""Road Trip Mixtape Jamz: The Series,"" was on its third rotation and if I had to listen to ""I Like Big Butts"" one more time, my brain would have started hemorrhaging. Coincidentally, this was around the time our GPS started to ""avoid tolls"" and take us through every hayseed town in the fucking south of Alabama in the wee hours of the morning.
Given the fact that we'd been driving for a solid 12 hours and I was half delirious from never-ending bouts of the alphabet game, my recollection of this may not be as accurate as I insisted it was at the time. Alabama stop signs are crooked and thus are impossible to understand. Have you ever been stopped in the middle of the road at a stop sign you weren't sure was for you or not and literally said out loud, ""I don't get it?!"" I have.
I'm certain I ran more than a few stop signs during our tour of backwoods Alabama. But running those signs was the only law I broke that wasn't actually my fault. The fact that our maximum speed was 92 mph and our average speed was 80 mph while the speed limit was 70 mph most of the way, all while a bottle of tequila lay open in the backseat, is an indication that breaking laws wasn't high on my list of concerns.
Even though we spent spring break in PCB, Alabama got under my skin all week. How many times does a girl have to explain to a group of southerners that I would, in fact, NOT be giving them a lift to one of the clubs' beach parties because they were toting a Confederate flag to post on the beach? News FA-LASH: I live in the year 2011 and equality means freedom for everyone. Do you still think it's 1863?
Kindly, fuck off.
After a glorious week of margaritas, dolphins, beer pong tables made out of sand and sunburns in Florida (America's penis), we loaded up our car and settled on the road again for another miserable drive through what we both began to affectionately refer to as ""the worst state ever.""
Just in time to be relevant, ironic and just plain depressing, En Vogue's ""Back to Life, Back to Reality,"" popped on my ""Road Trip Mixtape Jamz: Part Deux"" CD. All I could think was how thankful I am that my ""back to life"" isn't back to a life in Alabama.
Did you have any irritating spring break run-ins? E-mail Stephanie with your stories at slindholm@wisc.edu.
