Washington DC — Traveling more than 400 miles alone is not a challenge for the faint of heart. Finding the correct terminal for your airline is enough to make an average person have an emotional breakdown. Traveling alone across a long distance is twice as difficult when you’re doing so for the first time.
This was my reality when I booked my flight home from Washington DC (where I go to school) to my hometown of Toledo, Ohio. Normally, a direct flight from DC to Toledo would only take an hour and a half, but my dad (a notoriously cheap person) found out that the trip to Ohio is twice as cheap if I had a layover. What was supposed to be an hour-and-a-half trip turned into a five-hour journey (thanks to my two-hour layover in New Jersey).
At 4:00 a.m. on the day of my flight, I was still frantically packing for my 8:00 a.m. flight. As I attempted to pack a week’s worth of clothing into a carry-on backpack (because I refused to pay an extra $50 for a checked suitcase), I realized that I wasn’t going to get any sleep before my flight.
At 5:00 a.m., I was packed and ready to go, but what I was not ready for was the Uber prices. My heart dropped down to the pits of my stomach when I saw that the cheapest Uber to the airport was $56. To a broke college student, paying $56 for an Uber is completely unheard of.
This guest post is in partnership with True Star Media.