Every group trip I have been on has a soft spot, and it tends to show up in the last hour of the drive home, when the cars that rolled out of the campground together all start needing different exits. On the way out everyone is pointed at the same pin on the map, windows down, somebody’s playlist rattling out of a phone speaker in the back seat. Going home, the coffee has worn off and the cars want to fan out toward different towns. For years I tried to hold the group together right up to the last interchange anyway, and it went badly almost every time.
Somebody would miss the split, end up on a frontage road in the dark, and text the group asking where everyone went.
Say goodbye half an hour early
What I do now is pick one last rest stop roughly half an hour before anyone has to leave the main highway, and we all pull in together and make that parking lot the real goodbye. You get out and stretch, and the air smells like diesel and cut grass from the strip by the picnic tables. Somebody always buys a terrible gas station coffee for the road. You hug the people you have been sharing a back seat with all weekend, and you say the “text me when you’re home” part out loud while you can still hear each other. When you pull back onto the highway after that, you are driving your own drive, even if you happen to share the next couple of interchanges with the car in front.
The actual highway split is a lousy place for anything emotional, because it is loud and everyone is concentrating on merging, and at least one person is in the wrong lane with their blinker going.
Moving the goodbye to a parking lot also takes the sting out of the wrong-turn panic that eats so many group drives. Once nobody is pretending the convoy is still intact, the silver SUV sliding off one exit early is a non-event, and no one loops back to find it. Each driver runs their own navigation and stops for the bathroom whenever they feel like it.
The Civic on the shoulder
The trip that changed my mind was a cabin weekend in northern Michigan with five cars. My cousin Lena was driving a tired old Civic that idled like a lawnmower, and she lived well off the route the rest of us needed, so the whole way south we kept trying to keep her tucked into the line. By the last interchange my shoulders were up around my ears and the group chat had gone completely silent.
Back then the plan was to pull onto the shoulder of the off-ramp and hug there before peeling away. The shoulder turned out to be barely wider than the car, and a semi went past close enough to shake the side mirrors and throw grit against my shins. Lena climbed out and we did an awkward sideways hug next to her rattling engine while the others sat in their cars staring hard at their phones. Nobody pulled away first, so we kept standing there on the gravel while the trucks kept coming. The air smelled like hot brakes and somebody’s exhaust.
Lena eventually got back in and left first because someone had to, and I watched her merge under the orange glow of a sodium lamp with a whole weekend of campfire smoke still in my clothes.
I blamed myself for that one, and I still do a little, because a real rest area with a bathroom and room to breathe was not far up the road.
Quiet is allowed
The last stretch of a group trip should feel quiet. Put on whatever you want to listen to and take whichever lane you like. If you need gas, stop for it, and if you don’t, keep going, because the group no longer needs a report on any of it. If you want to trade messages in the group chat once everyone is home that night, go ahead, but nobody has to drive in formation anymore.
Last month, on the coast
Last month I did this again on the way back from a long weekend on the coast, with my sister in the car behind mine. We pulled into the rest area together, and she hugged me in the middle of the parking lot with the wind snapping at our jackets and told me to call our mom. Then she got back in her car like it was nothing.
She pulled out ahead of me and I watched her tail lights until the trees hid them, then put on an old episode of This American Life and drove the rest of the way home alone, thinking about absolutely nothing.