Our freshman year of college, my friends and I decided we would go to San Felipe, Mexico, for spring break. We drove there in a Dodge Raider, which, if you didn't happen to see us on the highway that day, is essentially a metal lunchbox with windows and wheels. It's a two-door Tetris piece with a top speed of around 70 mph before the doors shake free. Our Dodge Raider deserved to be called a car about as much as I deserved to be called an adult, which was not at all. Still, five of us crammed inside at 3 a.m. with everything we thought we'd need in a foreign country (a stereo, some socks), and we drove for eight hours to the Baja coast of Mexico.
During the week we spent there, we slept in a hut at the end of a long, unpaved, and neglected beach road where windblown sand collected into piles like massive speed bumps, or, if you were someone who intended to die someday by way of jumping things, massive ramps. Each night as we'd head back to our tiny hut from town, we'd put on our seat belts, push the accelerator to the floor, and do our best to get all four tires of the car off the ground, because consequences were something only pregnant teenagers had to deal with, and because we were all pretty sure we might be immortal. While it was extraordinarily reckless, we found, even to our own surprise, that you can jump a Dodge Raider multiple times without the whole thing falling apart immediately.
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