First Time Traveling With a Partner

Last Summer I traveled for the first time without parents! This may seem like no big deal right—people travel by themselves all the time. Well I am not in that group of people, not at all. I like to believe I am an independent person, but this trip opened my eyes to how sometimes thinking you have to be independent all the time isn't the best way to do everything. Here I was, 24, a full-grown adult and yet I had never once traveled alone with a partner before. Whenever I have traveled in the past it has always been with parents who decide what and how we did things on our vacation. To say I was excited to do whatever I wanted would be an understatement. I was so excited to go places I never got to go before and yet I was so full of anxiety.

My partner at the time was shorter than me and I am 5'3! We both looked way younger than our age. I couldn't stop the stereotypes of how two young looking girls going to California was not safe. How bad things could so easily happen to us just because we were women who looked like younger girls. The anxiety of doing something for the first time was already pressing on my mind with a steady wave of self-doubting questions. All the stressing about the trip still didn't prepare me for what was to come.

The trip from Arizona to California, more specifically to the city of Los Angeles, is about a six-hour drive. Normally I love road trips but usually I am in the back seat with headphones drowning out the rest of the world while I fall asleep looking out at the nothingness. For this trip, I learned I have severe anxiety in the passenger seat. You see, I like being in control especially in a car; the passenger seat is like having a front row seat to an out of your control ride that could potentially kill you in my opinion. I can see that there is a car stopping ahead and feel the sweat forming and the tightness in my chest gradually choking me to death. I panic. I want to slam on the breaks but I can't because I am not in control! I thought the traffic in Phoenix was bad and hated driving on the freeway here but going into California I couldn't stop my body from having a death grip on my seat belt. It was not that my partner was a horrible driver or that I didn't trust her; it was more that I didn't trust the situation or the other cars. I have never had so many panic attacks or, shall I say, I have never had such a long string of panic attacks before in my life. I couldn't even rely on my prescription anxiety medicine because it would put me to sleep when I had to stay awake to help navigate. I also hate trying to help someone who is directionally challenged to navigate actual—no I just hate trying to help anyone navigate! I can use Google Maps like a pro by myself but when it comes to helping someone else, it becomes a train wreck. Now I do not take my anxiety medicine at the drop of a hat. I have ways to calm myself, but those things were not really an option. I couldn't put in headphones and try to focus on the music and breathe because I was navigating. I couldn't meditate because I was navigating. I couldn't tell the driver—my partner who was being kind enough to pay for a lot of the trip—that her podcast was somehow making my anxiety worse. She was after all using her vehicle to make the trip and driving. When I drive I insist on listening to what I want, especially in stressful traffic. I need what I need so I couldn't take what she needed away from her.

The drive gradually got worse and about an hour away from our hotel we hit a pretty bad pothole trying to avoid getting hit by the car coming in our lane and the front passenger tire blew out on the freeway! I was in panic mode and honestly, if I had been driving I am not sure how my reaction would have been but my partner stayed calm and got us off the freeway and into a gas station. I took a deep breath and told myself I knew how to take control and fix the situation. My dad prepared me for this day and now was the time to use it. I somehow found this courage and suppressed all the anxiety that had been boiling over inside me. I am going to credit that to the adrenaline of the entire situation. It was around 3 PM and we were somewhere we both didn't know, surrounded by strangers and I didn't want help from said strangers even if it was the middle of the day! Now after parking the car, my partner had her moment of panic and I could tell she wanted to cry; this also helped me because I like to take care of people so I reassured her that this was no big deal and that she did everything right in the situation. I got out and assessed the damage. I knew we needed a new tire so I had her look for tire shops while I moved our stuff out of the trunk to get the spare tire. I got the bolts off the tire but when I went to jack the car up we had yet another problem. The hand jack that was in her trunk was missing the rod you put in to turn the jack and lift the car. I searched the tools I had brought for just such an emergency and could only find a small screwdriver that fit the rod hole. I slowly but surely managed to get the car jacked as I melted in the mid-day sun. I wore the wrong shoes, the all black slip-on canvas was heating up to an unbearable temperature so much so that I had to have my partner pour water on my shoes as I struggled to get the car jacked up. I managed to get the little spare tire on and knew it was no good. We found a place luckily only down the road but the spare tire didn't make it there without halfway falling off the rim. We honestly barely made it to the tire shop. I was not about to let that happen again so after getting a new tire we also got a full-sized spare and rim then proceeded to an auto zone to get a new car jack.

When we headed out I thought, "Okay, that was the worst of it and we handled it well really well." We didn't fight or get mad, we worked together, and I was proud and happy for a moment. It didn't last long as we got back on the freeway to be greeted with stop and go traffic and many more potholes, each one making my heart literally feel like it had stopped beating for a moment. I was exhausted from living the day in panic and coming down from the adrenaline high. We got to the hotel and I knew I had made a horrible mistake picking the place when we pulled up and everything felt sketchy. The type of hotel was just not great and it was in not so great of a location and it was really obvious once we were there. I was way too tired to worry too much and I was sad that I felt too tired and gross, from literally panic sweating all day, to go to the closest beach that we had planned to go to once we were settled in the hotel. I was not physically able to handle one more minute on a freeway and wasn't even feeling hungry because of how my stomach had been tight the entire trip here. So we went to the closest target and just got food there and called it a night deciding to just stay in the hotel. That did turn out to be a really good plan—one of the highlights of the trip for sure. It was refreshing to have a nice king size bed and privacy in a place other than a car.

The next day we had lots of plans to go to Venice Beach and Santa Monica pier. I was not excited at all to get back in the car but I was desperate to finally go to the beach. I needed to see and feel the ocean. Unfortunately, this meant driving in more stop and go crazy traffic while trying to navigate the freeway and panicking over every bump in the road. We took some wrong turns; we got off in the wrong places; we had a struggle to find parking; we didn't come very prepared with cash; things were not off to a wonderful start. I got a blister and turned into a big baby about walking around Venice. I didn't like how crowded it was and the smells that were forcefully hitting me in the face or the fact that we were walking so much in the muggy weather when we could have been enjoying the water. I just didn't want to be there at all. I tried to put on a little bit of a face. I mean the culture of street art and shops was neat but none of it seemed worth it to me. By the time we hit Santa Monica, my feet were done and the pier seemed a lot less awesome and more dreadful than anything. I enjoyed the beautiful view but honestly liked the end of the day the most, sitting in the sand and playing in the water, but it still wasn't satisfying because my partner is scared of the ocean and doesn't go past dipping her feet in then just wants to sit in the sand. While I was itching to play in the water I wished we had brought boggy boards and that we had come with friends because I wanted to play. I was also dreading the trip back to the hotel and was so over navigating. I didn't even realize how sun burnt I had gotten throughout the day so we had to make another trip to the Target and luckily we got more comfortable shoes for me for the next day. We had another pretty good night but we ended up sleeping in a bit too much.

We scrapped some of our plans and decided to go to Huntington Beach because I really wanted to go to one of the nicer beaches. The trip there resulted in us both breaking down to the point of tears and a bit of arguing. At one point I was ready to say forget everything else I want to go home. Luckily we didn't we stayed at the beach and actually enjoyed a few hours there. Driving back to the hotel again exhausted me and I was really feeling how sunburnt I was. I was cranky and didn't want to do anything we planned. I didn't want to take a bath with my partner like we had both wanted to do before we left Arizona. I didn't want to be romantic. I didn't want to go to the observatory. I didn't want to eat. So I fell asleep and when I woke up it was pretty late and we argued about how I didn't feel good and was ready to go home as early as possible the next day. I was done with everything.

I didn't sleep much and felt sick from the sun burns I was dreading the drive home I was dreading dealing with the unresolved awkwardness between my partner and I from the arguing. Things felt off the entire way home and by the time we hit Phoenix I was over everything past a point of control and burst into tears and hysteria. I cried for the forty minutes it took to get to my house from the city. My partner tried to comfort me but all I wanted was my mom.

I learned so much from this one trip. I learned about myself and how to better prepare for such trips. Although I am no longer with said partner, I feel like she helped me figure some things out about myself and it was a successful trip for the most part. I survived the panic attacks and all the anxiety.