They had met when they joined the same sorority five years prior and quickly became close friends and, later, roommates. Now, they were just two months away from starting graduate school 500 miles apart. The weeks before then, they decided, should be filled with fun and adventure. They wanted to see California together. And they wanted to take their time getting there.

Those were the ambitions that echoed in Darcy and Debbie’s minds as they finally crossed from Arizona into California last fall — 51 years after their road trip first began.

“We smelled the flowers along the way,” Darcy said. There were more flowers than they expected. Setting out the first time, the two friends had little to rely upon outside of a map, a AAA Triptik, and a bright orange 1972 Buick Skylark with a white vinyl top.

“If you know Darcy and me,” Debbie said, “you know there wasn’t a lot of planning.”

They embraced every unexpected stop, detour, and adventure they could. They visited colleges they’d once applied to before choosing Otterbein, and esoteric historic sites like the childhood home of Dwight D. Eisenhower, America’s 34th president.

They fell in love with places like New Mexico and the Grand Canyon. Debbie recalls getting a flat tire while driving on a desolate country road in Kansas and being stumped by how they were supposed to replace it with the spare they had in the trunk until a farmer puttering by on a large tractor stopped to lend a hand.

Then, last fall — 51 years after they first embarked from Ohio — the lifelong friends decided they’d waited long enough. Opting to pick up from the same place they left off, Debbie and Darcy flew to Phoenix, rented a car, and began their drive to San Francisco. In many ways, the end of the five-decade journey was a lot different from the beginning. Both women’s husbands tagged along, for starters. To accommodate the larger carload, a modern Toyota SUV took the place of the ’72 Skylark.

But the spirit of the old trip remained. The group set aside two weeks to make the 12-hour drive, expecting lots of twists and turns along the way.

“We went from Phoenix to San Diego, and then just followed the coast up, taking our time and enjoying the coastal California drive and being tourists,” Darcy said.

As rare as it is to find a friendship that endures the way Darcy and Debbie’s has, lifelong bonds like this are one of many unique things Otterbein alumni take pride in. In fact, recently Lynn Ridinger established a $25,000 scholarship endowment in honor of a Round Robin letter-writing circle that her parents — Miriam Wetzel Ridinger ’51, P’82 and Gerald “Jug” Ridinger ’49, P’82 — maintained with eight Epsilon Kappa Tau alumnae (read more at right) and their spouses for more than 70 years after graduating.