It’s not often people get to copy a childhood dream and paste it right into their adult life. But for Cassie Aran and Lauren Lee, that’s pretty much exactly how it happened—with a few, literal, detours, of course.
As kids, they drove toy cars together around their neighborhood, and dreamt of hitting the open roads. Now, at the age of 29, they’ve done it. Recently, they completed a 597-mile drive in a pair of toy cars, from Jacksonville, Florida, all the way to Key West. As TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram creators, of course they brought us along for the ride.
From complicated repairs to tedious detours and unexpected friction with traffic cops, it was well worth watching. But for all the mishaps that made it the ultimate armchair travel saga, it was also an exercise in true joy, and—we think—a good reminder that sometimes the silliest ideas lead to the biggest payoffs.
“People were just so supportive and excited, and it brought so much joy to their day,” Lee says of all the strangers they met along the way, many of whom recognized them from following their journey online. “That was something that I had completely underestimated, and it turned out to be my favorite part.”
