On the highway to hell
Three hours and 59 minutes. That’s how long it should have taken us. According to Google, it was just under four hours from Motueka to Hanmer Springs, where we were heading for two days of family fun. A last-minute holiday to take advantage of Nelson Anniversary Weekend. A small pick-me-up after being flattened by the back-to-work slump.
We’d head away in the evening, we decided. The boys would sleep on the way. We’d be on the road by teatime and at the holiday house by bedtime.
But my partner was held up at work, so 6pm came and went. It’s fine, we reasoned, as we finally backed out of the driveway at 8.45pm. The roads will be quiet – we’ll get in just after midnight.
It wasn’t fine. It was ghastly. The problem wasn’t the boys. They were tucked quietly into their car seats, one contemplating the road ahead; one pondering the view behind. The problem was definitely me. It used to be a point of strangely misplaced pride for my mother that I could read in a moving vehicle, such was my fortitude in the face of car sickness. I know the exact day that this skill left me forever. It was on a humid evening in mid-2009, on a fragrant bus ride that descended Victoria Peak in Hong Kong. The driver was flicking the bus around each hairpin bend like he was inside a pinball machine. I was lying across an impolite number of seats, my stomach lurching alarmingly, while sympathetic locals showed my much hardier partner which pressure points around my ear to squeeze to quell the nausea.
In recent years, he’s patiently tended to those pressure points across the length of the country, from a New Year’s holiday in the Coromandel to my mother’s 60th birthday in my southern hometown of Milton. We won’t even talk about the horrifying evening when we drove to Karamea. Really, it’s a miracle that he still gets in a car with me at all.
We differ largely on the matter of when a holiday actually begins – a common relational plight, I believe. I subscribe to the theory that the adventure starts as soon as we get into the car, which means that I amperfectly willing to be delayed by any number of distractions. Look, a boutique cheese shop! A pottery studio! A roadside fruit stall!
In contrast to this frivolity, my partner struggles to relax into holiday mode until the car is ceremoniously parked at our destination. For him, happening upon a neighbouring town’s craft market is not a prodigious coincidence, but a frustrating and expensive waste of precious travelling time. There have been arguments. There has been sulking. I’m not proud of it, but there we are.
Given his destination-driven mindset, he should have been on to a winner with our Hanmer adventure – not even the Murchison petrol station was open by the time we made it that far.
A short distance into the Lewis Pass, however, after I’d gotten tired and surrendered the driving to him, he began to see the unhappily familiar signs from the passenger seat. At a glance, you might assume that I was deep into the second stage of labour. My face was screwed up. My breath was slowly hissing from my lungs. I was quietly writhing and delicately clutching my stomach.
My partner knows the signs far too well and would probably have preferred to be attending the birth of his children.
‘‘How did we forget that this is what happens when you’re tired?’’ he asked me in bewilderment as I slid further and further down in my seat. I looked up at him blankly from underneath the dashboard and didn’t bother to answer. It’s a moot point. We have two small children and poor self-discipline. We’re always tired. If we waited until we were well-rested before attempting our next holiday, it’d be on some sort of golden anniversary cruise.
He may not share my love of craft fairs, but in times of dire need, my partner is a superhero. He stopped the car, over and over, so that I could stumble around, hunched double in the night air. He held me upright and urged me to concentrate on the cool gravel under my bare feet to distract me from my misery. He let me use him as a pillow when gravity overwhelmed me and I lay down on the roadside. All of this with no complaint – although at one stop, I caught him staring bleakly at a road sign that announced we were a tantalizing 7km from our destination.
We crawled into the driveway some time after 3.30am, utterly unceremoniously. The holiday house had been booked on price rather than amenities, so we had to fumble about making the beds before we could collapse into them.
Four hours later, I got up with the boys and we walked into town to give their father a hero’s sleepin. It seemed only fair.