‘Family holiday’ is an oxymoron
Nothing broadens your horizons – or your waistline – quite like a monthlong holiday abroad with two kids and two grandparents in tow. Four weeks, three American states and a far too many frozen margaritas later, I’ve returned home feeling both strung-out and skinny.
(Did I say skinny? I actually wrote skint, but auto-correct is obviously having a laugh.)
International holidays are an oxymoron, for travelling with family is quite possibly the least leisurely of all so-called leisure pursuits. It’s as if everything from the po-faced security staff to the time-space vortex that is the average suitcase (what goes in often doesn’t come out, or if it does it won’t go back in again) is spoiling for a fight.
When our brood travels in convoy, we make Simon Bridges and Jami-Lee Ross look like bromance besties. We bicker (me and Dad), nitpick (me and the husband), physically brawl (the kids), throw tantrums (Dad and the kids), and then we all turn on Mum for refusing to negotiate peace settlements.
On the plus side, all is well with an ice cream sandwich (for the kids), beer and American footy on the telly (the husband), a bit of a sulk (Dad) and a round of pina coladas (me).
In typical Kiwi fashion, everywhere we went from Hawaii to the Grand Canyon, we took the weather with us. In Arizona, there was an unprecedented deluge. Roads and schools were closed by flash flooding. It was breaking news: an entire inch fell!
Torrential rain followed us to Disneyland, where Albert Hammond was right on the money. It never rains in southern California but when it pours, man, it pours.
At least as the rain fell, the two-hour queues for the best rides rapidly evaporated.
Travel, I told my kids, is a lesson in patience and tolerance. Though that was sorely tested in the hotel hot tub we shared with a Donald Trump supporter who declared that climate change had nothing to do with environmental pollution – it is, apparently, all due to volcanoes.
As a spectator sport masquerading as democracy, American politics seems bonkers when viewed from the other side of the world, but let me tell you it makes even less sense when you’re in the thick of it.
On a cruise ship off Maui I watched Christine Blasey Ford relive her teenage sexual assault with dignity and humility while the boy she accused of holding her down, now a man considered one of the best conservative legal minds in America, railed and petulantly wailed his way onto the Supreme Court regardless.
As for the permatanned buffoon overseeing the whole debacle, well, everyone has an opinion of the US President so, in a highly unscientific poll, I asked all our uber drivers for theirs. For every Bill – the Hispanic, self-employed, former dollar-store retailer who drove us to the Los Angeles County Museum – who declared that Trump as getting ‘‘results, results, results for real Americans’’, there was a Hamed, whose wife was trapped in Iran by US immigration policies and had no hope of joining her husband in the Land of the Free.
On our way to the airport, our driver Michael – black, educated, California bornand-bred – didn’t say a word until I asked what he thought of Trump. From that point on, we couldn’t get a word in.
‘‘Oh, man. The man’s demented! He’s deranged! I feel like the rest of the world is laughing at us. Is the rest of the world laughing at us? Please tell me the rest of the world isn’t laughing at us?’’ he ranted. Cough. Mumble.
American politics might be venomously divisive but at least American cuisine is allinclusive. They’ll deep fry anything from a zucchini to a gherkin. However, three weeks in, when I hit peak cheeseburger and fries, I sought out celery and carrot sticks at a small-town Safeway supermarket.
‘‘What part of Australia are you from?’’ asked the longhaired, laid-back dude on the checkout.
‘‘New Zealand,’’ I sighed, for the hundredth time.
‘‘Oh,’’ he said, ‘‘can I ask you a question about New Zealand?’’
‘‘You may,’’ I replied, expecting a pop quiz on hobbits, sheep, or All Blacks. ‘‘I heard that in New Zealand, the indigenous Ma¯ ori language is enjoying a resurgence and more and more people are taking lessons and learning to speak it. Is that true?’’
It is, I said.
‘‘Man,’’ he smiled, ‘‘that’s awesome.’’ ‘‘To travel,’’ Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, once said, ‘‘is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.’’