The plane is loud, your ears pop, you never get a window seat, and you always sit next to the 45-year-old obese lady who won’t stop snoring.

Can you believe that some people have never been on an airplane? Can you also believe that some college students have never been on a road trip?

This almost constitutes blasphemy…madness even! Both are great experiences that should be shared with the best of company.

Flying is not the cheapest expense in the world, but there are many more expensive things you could be spending your money on. A weekend of hard drinking, perhaps? Tuition? Christmas presents?

For $200 you could fly, round trip, to Florida and spend a four day weekend sitting in the sun. Take a couple hundred dollars for a hotel and a couple hundred dollars for spending and you could have just what you need to get away from professors, papers and piles of homework.

Flying, as you may already know, is also much faster than driving.

Three hours to get to Florida, an hour and a half to get to Baltimore and two hours to get to Atlanta. Convert those to driving hours it’s 24 hours to Florida, 14 hours to Baltimore and 18 hours to Atlanta.

Airlines are also decked out with some cool gadgets now. For example, I was on a USA 3000 flight and a DVD player came down in front of my seat.

Granted, the movie was crap (Bernie Mac’s “Mr. 3000”), but I felt first class all the way. With my gourmet sandwich, complementary headphones and XM Satellite radio, I was a king.

Flying isn’t all high and mighty, however.

While the takeoffs are pretty cool, once you are off the ground everyone is thinking the same thing: “I hope that was just turbulence.”

Seriously, turbulence is the bane of flying. No one enjoys it. It’s like having someone sneak up behind you, scare you and leave laughing, only to come back 20 minutes later and do it all over again.

On top of the turbulence, landings are never smooth. They always freak me out. The last trip I was on, the wheels hit the tarmac crooked. Plus the plane is loud, your ears pop, you never get a window seat and you always sit next to the 45-year-old obese lady who won’t stop snoring.

Yes, those are all clichés, but they do actually happen.

Driving can also be a wonderful thing, though. Most of the things we dread on an airplane we can avoid on a road trip.

For example, you can always have a window seat in a car provided you only brought four people. The car is only as loud as the radio or the number of windows that are open.

The entertainment in a car can be limited in some cases but exuberant in others. DVD players are becoming quite popular in cars and vans these days.

If you can’t afford to get one put in your car, your friends will surely appreciate the portable one you bought for the trip. Music and books are always available, but those are commodities on an airplane as well.

However, if you forget to bring reading material onto a plane you are royally screwed because all you have to look at is the official airline magazine or the safety pamphlet.

Food is never an issue on a road trip. All you need is a cooler and a brown grocery bag. Fill it up with the goodies you want and you are all set. Oreos, soda and Doritos are a staple of any solid road trip.

Driving the car is usually cheaper than flying, too, especially if your destination has family or friends.

That being said, road trips do have a draw back or two…or three…or four.

First is the time it takes to travel to your destination. Second, passengers can go completely nuts watching the scenery, especially through the Midwest (Illinois specifically).

Third, the car could breakdown, leaving you hoping that one of your friends has Triple AAA. On top of that, someone will almost surely lock the keys in the car.

Lastly, all that food you bought? Yeah, the wrappers have to go somewhere, and the first option is the bottom of your car because someone always forgets a garbage bag.

I think the winner is obvious in this one.

Road trips in a car are much more fun than a direct plane ride to the place of pleasure. People say it’s all about the journey, not the destination. I find this to be one hundred percent true.

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