How a Spoiled Twenty-Three-Year-Old kid Ruined a Long Car Ride

My New Year’s Eve 2000 could have been much more enjoyable…

I started dating a girl from drama school in the middle of 1999. She was very young, she was seventeen, I was twenty-nine, so I went slow because she had never had a man in her life. We “played” a lot, of course, we were in love and excited. But that story of one piece fitting the other did not happen.

And that was okay… I wanted it to be extraordinary, so I gave her the time she wanted.

A few weeks after we started dating, her best friend and boyfriend, of whom we were inseparable, invited us to spend New Year’s Eve in Porto Seguro, a famous beach town here in Brazil. It would be New Year’s Eve 1999/2000, an exceptional occasion, right?

My girlfriend thought it was too. I saw in her eyes that Porto Seguro would stay in our memories in the most incredible way possible.

The big problem was my pocket, which was always empty. When we started to calculate how much the trip would cost, we realized that neither she nor I would go. Her best friend was dating an absurdly wealthy guy, so money was not a problem for them. But for us, it was. So I proposed: if we went by car, we would be able to pay. But we would have to go by car.

The best friend’s boyfriend didn’t like the idea very much. He refused to give up his car — I don’t remember which one it was, but it was in the Audi and Mercedes category , forcing us to go on the best friend’s Volkswagen Gol 1000, one of the simplest and most popular cars in Brazil at that time.

Finally, after settling for the idea, he started to get excited about the trip. After all, “Let’s have fun getting to know Brazil!”.

Little did he know…

The first big problem arose when choosing the route. I wanted to go by the coast, seeing all the beaches from São Paulo to Porto Seguro. He said no. The best course was through Belo Horizonte, inland.

I then went to do some research. Belo Horizonte’s was a shorter route. It was not such a beautiful route, but it was faster. As he had given up when choosing the means of transport, I gave up when selecting the road.

And we hit the road in the full Gol 1000 (the “1000” is for its power, 1000cc).

The deal was that the guy and I would take turns driving. As I said at the beginning of the story, I was already twenty-nine years old, so I was past the “Speed ​​Racer” stage on the road. But he didn’t… At twenty-three, and at a time when road radars were rare around here, after a few hours of travel, he decided to step on the gas.

I never imagined that a Gol 1000 would be able to go over a hundred miles an hour.

Even more on a winding road.

I know that, at one point, his girlfriend started screaming for him to drive slowly. When the two finally fought, he gave in and handed me the direction.

I drove for a few hours and finally turned the steering wheel over to him, who seemed calmer. I remember that I calculated that the trip would take about twelve or thirteen hours. I was following on the map (on paper, there was no GPS available to the public at the time) and saying, “In two hours, we will be in Belo Horizonte” — and we would arrive four hours later. “In an hour, we will pass Nanuque!” — and we would come three hours later.

And this was irritating the guy more and more.

The funny thing is that I, my girlfriend and her friend were enjoying the trip. It was taking longer, so what? But the guy was PISSED. And his bad mood was contaminating us. The worst thing is that when he drove, he took his anger on the gas pedal, leaving us nervous.

And as the guy only left the steering wheel when his girlfriend shouted at him, the two fought the entire trip.

My girlfriend had a video camera and recorded the entire trip. There are very funny stretches, like on a road that passed through Bahia and, suddenly, turns into a dirt road — this happened at night, with no lighting except the car headlights. I ended up driving about seventy percent of the route since nobody liked the Mjolnir-foot behind the wheel… And we arrived, exhausted, at Porto-Seguro TWENTY HOURS after the departure.

The boy had booked the inn. We couldn’t find it. We drove for about forty minutes and nothing. I must emphasize that we had rented an apartment with only one room, that is, one of the couples would have to sleep in the living room.

And this couple was the poorest.

My girlfriend and me, of course.

But when we didn’t find the inn, I decided to stop at a much more excellent hotel than the inn where we would stay. I remember that, at the time, the daily rate of the inn would cost fifty dollars for each one of us. That fantastic hotel cost fifty-five dollars. No, my friend had not done a bad deal… The hotels raised the price in advance, imagining that they would be sold out on that New Year’s Eve, and the city ended up much more empty than calculated, which caused the prices to plummet.

I remember I came down from the car EXHAUSTED, grabbed my bags and my girlfriend’s, and went to the bedroom.

It was a fantastic place.

When we saw that we even had a hot tub, suddenly the tiredness ended. She was excited, me too, we took off our clothes, we went to the bathtub…

And the intercom rang: THAT SON OF A// I MEAN, THAT GUY GOT OUT AND FOUND THE INN! He had already reversed our check-in; we would have to leave the room immediately.

OK…

We went away very angry. And in the apartment, we had to sleep in the living room.

Do you imagine how smooth our first time was in a room without doors?

Even so, it was memorable…

I will skip the content of our stay there, which yields several stories. And now I’m going to tell you about the return trip — which was worse than the outward journey — since, if you got here, you could read fifteen or twenty more pages.

New Year’s Eve 2000 was stormy here in Brazil. The storms broke down barriers on the roads, which caused massive traffic jams… The guy who went with us had lied to his parents, telling them we would take the bus. His parents were afraid of him driving, can you believe it? I saw in the TV news that the bus ride from Porto Seguro to São Paulo was taking seven or eight hours longer because Dutra Highway was paralyzed! But we did not need to follow the same path as the bus. We could go along the coast, my initial plan. And this is what we decided to do.

We had the good sense to plan a stop along the way to sleep and rest during the night, so the rush was not that great.

But the spoiled boy started to revolt again…

When we arrived in Vitória and we were looking for a place to have dinner — and the guy was fighting her girlfriend again — my girlfriend and I heard this:

SHE — Boyfriend, stop being unpleasant! You’re ruining the trip!

HE — You and I didn’t need to be here! I have money! We had to be on a plane!

At that moment, I asked them to drop us off at the bus station, and we would figure out a way to go back to São Paulo. But the girl convinced us to stay in the car, and we continued the trip with them.

The tricky thing is that, on the news, they repeated all the time that Dutra Highway was jammed and nobody was getting to São Paulo… I told him to calm down, that if we arrived too early — since we were using other roads that were empty — is that his parents would be suspicious.

It didn’t help.

The trip ended with everyone in a bad mood.

His parents found out that we went by car, as we arrived too early thanks to his haste.

And we never went out with that couple again, who was hand and glove with us until then.