Ah the '90s, a simpler time, right? Pre-internet, pre-texting, pre-Apple product ubiquitousness when the music in the car was limited to your CD (or cassette!) player and the whims of your local radio disc jockey. I can only imagine what a free-for-all it is to drive around with your friends now; every song you've ever loved conveniently located in your pocket. Honestly, the idea alone stresses the '90s girl in me the hell out. How do kids decide what to listen to, these days? (Oh wow, I sound like my mother.) Luckily, I did the things every cool '90s girl did in her car with her BFF, so I didn't have to scroll though 1,206,729 songs on an iPod before landing on a playlist that would suffice. (Seriously, again, how did you kids do it and why do I sound like my mother?)
In between doing the "Macarena" and the "Electric Slide," and while wearing Gap Scents and Doc Martens, one of the highlights of being a teenager in the '90s was driving with your best friend for an undisclosed amount of time on a highway, probably, to nowhere. Granted, I wasn’t able to drive until the very end of the '90s, but many of my friends and my brother beat me to it and they (as the best passenger and/or backseat driver the world has ever seen) gave me a preview of what can only be describe as '90s heaven on earth.
To this day, I can clearly remember the inside of some of my friend’s cars; the manual windows and the tattered floor boards and the horrible sound systems that rattled and the views of our favorite routes to and from school (which often included detours, to give us more time together). I mean, we were able to drive and listen to '90s music so we were totally cool and, well, if you were a cool kid in the '90s, you probably did the following, too: