A leisurely road trip, especially with ‘like-minded’ people, they say, is a great stress buster. You fight traffic snarls and impatient commuters every day of the week as you drive to and from work and vow that you never want to take the wheel again — but when you get out onto the highways with a holiday destination in mind, you apparently feel quite different.
You have the freedom to stop whenever you like: to stretch your legs, take your time over a relaxed lunch or have a nap before you start again. With no appointments at the other end (hopefully), you can take minor detours or park at an attractive roadside hotel for an overnight stay if the urge gets you.
Growing up, we were treated to many such road journeys: When we would head to the hills from the plateau towns where we lived in the state of Maharashtra. Despite being a relatively small family — just three children — we each occupied an inordinate amount of space in our car and therefore most of the journey went in squabbles over who needed to push up and give the others a little more leg room or elbow room, who ought to take a deep breath and not let it out until we reached our destination, who smelt too strongly of the last snack ingested ... and so on.
The driver (our father) and the navigator (our mother) most often ignored the noise from the back despite the fact that they could not drown out the sound of the hostilities with earphones directing calming music into their ears or a music system entertaining all of us. (That would surely have led to further disagreement between the children.) So, they had to listen as we waged our battles in the back seat and sometimes, just to keep the peace, the youngest one was pulled over into the front seat. Our car did not have individual bucket seats and there was a spacious single seat in front and everyone should have been comfortable — but as luck would have it, the youngest of us wasn’t the tiniest in size and it was a tight squeeze up there. Thus, the driver was not too comfortable while changing gears and manoeuvring around hairpin bends, but at least the back-seaters got a reprieve from their space wars — and more important, silence reigned.
In adulthood, we laughed over all those road journeys and the minor and major skirmishes that had taken place. We were quite sure that our smaller family and larger four-wheeler would ensure peaceful, stress-free road journeys. True, we still hadn’t graduated to a music system in our vehicle, but we had a ‘driver’ who fancied himself as a singer and he was ready to entertain us as we went along.
Being on the road and listening to his father’s off-key crooning delighted our toddler beyond everything he had experienced until then and he proved to be a model passenger. However, we also had a four-legged family member who didn’t care much for her master’s voice raised in song and she spent a large part of the journey treating us to the entire repertoire of her barks — from impatient to excited and then, when she felt her sensitive ears had taken all they could, agitated yelps and finally, outraged howls — and we knew it was time for a break ...
Obviously, all those turbulent road journeys we embarked on as children and as adults were no stress-busters for any of the holiday-makers. But it seems that we learnt no lessons from the past because, even now, getting into a car and getting onto the highway still brings the promise of absolute freedom to stop and start and dream and linger wherever the heart dictates.
Cheryl Rao is a freelance journalist based in India.
