So I discovered the hard and painful way that my 5 year friendship with my autistic friend (same age/gender), as a autistic person, isn’t quite at the point yet where sleepovers make sense. However me and my friend live 2 hours apart on exact opposite ends of the same city. So I’m not exactly sure what our options are for hanging out in person; considering we live quite far from each other, but sleepovers are impractical and don’t make sense yet.

Since both of us are autistic and young, we don’t exactly have the money for restaurants or movies. Plus the city libraries close at 4:45pm on Saturdays and Sundays, meaning that when we have the weekend off, options for meeting is limited. Living 2 hours apart from each other makes meeting for a meal quite time expensive, since one of us would have a 4 hour round trip commute. Meeting in the evening means leaving at 7:25 p.m. for a 10pm bedtime, or going to bed after midnight if we were to meet til 10pm.

For me in particular, I come from a particularly very toxic family, so meeting at my home isn’t exactly the best idea, and I have a desire to be less reliant on texting/voice chatting; and put greater value on face to face interaction with my friend. I only recently met with my friend’s family for the first time attending his graduation, at his now-alta mater, on his behalf.

So what are good options/activites for me and my friend to hang out IRL in this situation? The two of us can’t drive due to our autism. We both rely on the city public transport’s bus and subway system for transportation and will need to do so for the rest of our lives. (Both of us do like trains, and we tend to prefer deep convos and share our obsessions with minecraft, weather, transportation, etc.; but we are comfortable with other activites like going walking outside together, etc.)