HIT THE ROAD FOR GOOD TIMES

FOR some people, the idea of jamming their entire family in a car and driving a long distance sounds like as much fun as digging a trench with a spoon, but I’ve always loved a road trip. I’ve never cared about the direction, the car or the state.

As long as it’s an Australian road that leads to a destination that has humans and a beer then I’m as happy as a pig in a really nice restaurant, which I think is probably a much happier pig than the pig in … well, you know the rest.

Like most people my age and older, road trips meant sitting on vinyl seats that burnt like a BBQ hotplate and made you sweat like a squash player. Instead of an iPad, we played “I spy with my little eye”.

Yet I still remember those road trips as some of my best holiday memories.

That’s not to say that things didn’t go wrong. We were never quite sure the car would make the distance without overheating, so we filled bottles with water and the kids were never allowed to take as much as a sip in 45-degree heat because – as we were often reminded – “the car may need a drink if she gets a little hot”.

Even when we finally got to a service station, we’d often come out of the bathrooms saying “I wouldn’t drink out of those disgusting taps even if I was dying of thirst”, which ironically we actually were.

The reason for this dilemma is the idea of putting water that falls from the sky for free into a bottle and charging more than petrol for it hadn’t been invented yet.

Then, an hour further down the road, you would see a golden glow that would make all this pain worth it ... oh, yeah, the golden arches of a McDonald’s. The chant would go up from the back seat, front seat, rear section of the station wagon or parcel shelf, mum’s knee, or the ute tray ... wherever the kids were being stored: “Can we get McDonald’s, can we get McDonald’s?”

Mum would say: “No, it’s OK kids, I’ve made some peanut butter sandwiches,” and, as we all know, if it’s one thing that a desert-dry throat is in desperate need of, it’s a peanut butter sandwich!

Looking back, it sounds like some sort of Dickens novel, so much has changed.

Cars now have airconditioning and some have eight-seats – with seatbelts for everyone and airbags to keep all the family alive. There are phones in nearly everyone’s pockets that can distract kids from seeing the McDonald’s signs.

There are restaurants evenly-spaced every 300m on the roads and cold drinking water is available in clean bottles at every servo. And cars just don’t break down that often anymore – in fact, my kids have never waited for a roadside service vehicle ever in their lives.

Thanks to COVID, there’s never been a better time to grab your loved ones and some peanut butter sandwiches and hit the road. Get out and see this amazing continent up close and personal.

See ya on the road, folks.