These TikTokkers drove toy cars 600 miles around Florida. But why?

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.”

Originally, Aran and Lee wanted to set a Guinness World Record for furthest distance driven in toy cars. There’s no existing record for this in the books, but their attempt was ambitious: They aimed to drive at least 500 miles in the cars, on quiet residential roads, bike lanes, and sidewalks.

“We had this fun idea like, ‘what happens if we try to take a toy car like a crazy distance?’” Aran says. “How far can these toy cars even go? We drove them as kids and always wondered that, but we never were able to do that, obviously, as children. So it was partially out of curiosity and partially for the challenge of it. Would it even be possible? Not just for the car, but for us, too.”

They went back and forth with the records organization for months to draft a plan, but they abandoned the record attempt over a disagreement about fees. When Guinness learned that Aran and Lee were raising money for the Best Friends Animals Society along their route, they asked for thousands of dollars in fees that would have eaten up too much of their donation pool. 

In the end, they raised about USD$20,000, and when they made it to Key West they were greeted by the mayor and city commissioner, who actually gave them a key to the city in appreciation of their adventure. 

“Pick someone who, even in the hard moments, is positive, is open to positivity … You need the other person to be picking you up, and you need to be receptive to that good energy, even when you don’t want to receive it.”

- Lauren Lee

It takes about nine hours to drive from Jacksonville to Key West at normal highway speeds, not counting breaks. But it took about a week of road-tripping for Aran and Lee to plot out a safe journey, turn by turn, and about two months of all-day driving to complete the route in toy cars.

On their scouting trip, they dropped pins on a Google Map so they could make sure they wouldn’t run out of sidewalk on dangerous roads. 

“We would [follow] a sidewalk for an hour and a half, and be like, ‘All right, there’s still sidewalk… there’s still sidewalk… there’s still sidewalk…’ and then it would just end,” Lee says. “And we’d have to backtrack an hour and a half and look for another sidewalk.” 

In that way, the journey also unexpectedly raised awareness about everyday access issues for people who use wheelchairs. Aran and Lee repeatedly came across places where the sidewalk didn’t have a step-free ramp to streets or parking lots, even in places where infrastructure was relatively new. 

“You would walk out of a side door to the hotel and there’s a sidewalk, but there’s no ramp to get from that side of the building onto the street,” Lee says. “No matter if it’s a brand-new building, sometimes people just don’t consider [accessibility].”

Aran and Lee are already plotting a few more trips together, and are the queens of highly-specific misadventure. For their next trick, they plan to ‘live’ in airports for a week without going outside or spending any money beyond the cost of their plane tickets. They have flight passes from Frontier Airlines that bring the cost down to USD$15-$30 per trip, and they’re planning to survive on snacks from airport lounges (they have a pass for that, too).

When asked how they plan to protect their friendship from the potential side effects of serious ‘hanger’ (the combo of hunger and anger), Lee and Aran laughed. They learned a lot on their toy car road trip, they said. Their friendship is pretty safe. And they had some advice for anyone else looking for their next travel buddy, too.

“Pick someone who, even in the hard moments, is positive, is open to positivity,” Lee says. “Some people, when they’re in a bad head space, they don’t want that positivity. They don’t want to hear the silver linings, or whatever, they kind of just wanna sit in it. Which is totally valid. But in doing something that’s challenging, there’s not always time to do that. You need the other person to be picking you up, and you need to be receptive to that good energy, even when you don’t want to receive it.”

***

Adventure.com strives to be a low-emissions publication, and we are working to reduce our carbon emissions where possible. Emissions generated by the movements of our staff and contributors are carbon offset through our parent company, Intrepid. You can visit our sustainability page and read our Contributor Impact Guidelines for more information. While we take our commitment to people and planet seriously, we acknowledge that we still have plenty of work to do, and we welcome all feedback and suggestions from our readers. You can contact us anytime at hello@adventure.com. Please allow up to one week for a response.