Road trips with strangers

Back in college, there was a board on campus plastered with cards from students seeking rides back home from other students lucky enough to have cars. The first year I was in school, I was without wheels, so I consulted the board a handful of times to get a ride with someone I didn’t know.

When you need to get from Point A to Point B, sometimes you can’t be picky about who drives you. But if you have a little time in advance to make your decision, it helps to meet the person who you may be traveling with, in order to determine if you can deal with them for the duration of the trip and establish some ground rules.

The most important issue to resolve is whether you’ll feel safe traveling with this person. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter much if you like the same music or can keep up a conversation for the duration of the drive. If the person makes you feel uncomfortable, it’s worth looking for another option.

If you feel comfortable enough to continue, here are some topics to bring up to determine if this is the right road-trip partner for you:

•    Are you expected to pitch in for gas or anything else that comes up on the drive?
•    Are you expected to share driving responsibilities?
•    If the trip lasts over one or more nights, what are the plans for camping/hotels/sleeping in the car?
•    Do you have compatible music preferences? If the driver controls the radio, can the passenger zone out with his iPod? This is a good point to also establish volume preferences.
•    Are you both chatterboxes? Hate to talk for hours on end? This topic isn’t usually a deal-breaker, but it’s always good to know so you can set expectations accordingly and not feel as if your insulting someone if you prefer to spend some of the trip time in silence.

Certainly, if you’re traveling for a longer period of time and have a more extensive itinerary (and not just from Point A to Point B), there may be more things to discuss. And if you are hitchhiking and advance time is impossible, that’s an entirely different story. Read Joel Carillet’s account of an inspirational hitchhiking experience.

Do you have any tried-and-true methods for successfully getting through a road trip with someone you don’t know well? Please share them in the comments section.