Four years ago, I found myself sitting in the driver’s seat of my brand-new car with my best friend in the passenger seat. We drove from Southern California to Oregon, camping and visiting with friends along the way. What started as some sort of cheesy rom-com where a friend tried their best to reunite two old friends with a bit of history became a cheesy story of friendship that we still talk about until this day.

My best friend and I found ourselves, once again, traveling by car across the country. However, instead of heading north, we traveled east so that my best friend could move the last of her things to her new place in Texas. We traveled with two well-behaved dogs in the back seat of her newer truck next to our luggage piled off onto one side and a trailer full of nearly everything my best friend owned with her new husband. I didn’t need to, but I jumped in the car to spend the last few days that I will have for a while with my best friend. I was also craving adventure, and I knew that we were planning on seeing the Grand Canyon.

I am thankful to have driven up close to the Colorado River and to have seen the beauty that transfixes millions in the Southwestern deserts. My jaw dropped at the sight of one of the seven natural wonders, and I found myself staring for two hours on the edge of a cliff overlooking the steep drop straight down to the eerily bluish-green-colored Colorado River.

I fell in love all over again with the brilliant mountains that decorated the landscape in the sandy terrain of New Mexico, and I witnessed the simplistic yet entrancing views that lined the sides of older country roads to Texas. Aside from tired eyes and brief stints of exhaustion, my best friend and I reveled in the opportunity that we saw the picturesque side of America that calls so many to visit and wander through.

There are so many interesting things to see in the U.S. Strange things, beautiful things, things I wish I never have seen. There are enough things along the roadsides in America that you can keep driving around for the rest of your life and not see everything. After traveling across the country multiple times, I know that I would do it all again.

A lot has happened in the four years since our last road trip together to Oregon and back, and I’m assuming more amazing things will happen in the coming years even if we are now thousands of miles away.