ON THE ROAD
four writers share their tales of
blustery, regressive, doped-up travel.
By
Sam
Prendergast
Every summer holidays when
I was growing up, my parents,
sister and I would take the same
three-hour road trip up New
Zealand’s east coast to camp near
the beach with our large extended
family. It was basically childhood
paradise. We spent two weeks,
sometimes more, sitting around a
fire, eating chips and dip, playing
cards, and going to the beach. Mr
Whippy’s ice-cream truck came
literally every night. The ‘campsite’
was a vacant property surrounded
by other vacant properties, so it
was ideally suited to backyard
cricket. And when it rained,
which it often does in New Zealand,
we’d all cram into a tent to play
charades and tell stories. It
was entirely as wholesome as it
sounds, at least according to my
nostalgic memory. Eventually, my
grandparents built a house on the
campsite and my uncles and aunties
bought the properties next door.
Houses went up and we all grew
into snotty adolescents.
A few summers ago, I went back
to New Zealand with my partner,
Tamsin, and we travelled up the
coast with my parents to spend a
week camping in what is now my
grandparents’ backyard. There are
a few different ways to recreate
childhood holidays with your
family as an adult. In the first,
you all travel together, without
any newcomers, as the four-person
unit that existed when you were
10 years old. Your parents play out
their parental roles and you and
your siblings regress. Careers and
private lives dissolve. No matter
who you are ordinarily, in this
moment you are a child. In another
version, usually reserved for those
who’ve entered ‘serious long-term
relationships’ or had children of
their own, you travel with your
parents but keep a little distance.
You hire a car and drive behind
them, stopping at leisure and
sending messages from the road that
read, “Go ahead, we’ll catch up.”
In the third – and worst – version,
you mash everything together:
you and your ‘serious long-term
partner’ decide that renting a car
is unnecessary, so you willingly
enter into scenario number one.
When your parents start calling you
“the girls” and asking if you have
your seatbelts on, you realise, with
horror, that they’ve just adopted
a new 35-year-old child, and that
child is your partner.Twenty hours into our New Zealand
summer, Tamsin and I found
ourselves crammed into the back of
my parents’ car covered in pillows
and packets of chips, as though
we were pre-teen girls. I only seemy parents a few times a year,
so whenever we’re together, our
memories of each other are a little
bit off. On my side of the car, my
parents had left a giant red bucket
and a box of tissues, a reference to
the fact that, as a child, I spent 90
per cent of every road trip spewing
and groaning about car sickness.
“They’re just being thoughtful,”
I told myself, ignorant of everything
to come. Road trips in my family are
punctuated by multiple bathroom
and snack stops – one for the pie, one
for the ice-cream, one for the mid-
trip can of L&P. There’s a certain
amount of tension that builds up
when your parents tell your adult
partner it’s too late in the day for
caffeine, or that now’s “a good time
to use the bathroom”.The weird thing about recreating
family holidays is that the balance
never ends up quite right. A few
people can’t get time off; new
partners and children change
the hierarchies of power; and
everyone ends up confused about
the relationship between those
two lesbians. “Do we call them
girls, friends...?” Five days into
the holiday, Tamsin and I had both
become adolescent versions of
ourselves, asking if we could use
the kayaks, sneaking beers from
the esky, and waving down Mr
Whippy, who still comes by the
campsite every night. In retrospect,
it probably made my parents happy,
but next time, we’re hiring a car.writers’ piece