The Last Family Road Trip

My parents are redecorating their house. This weekend, they got rid of their old 1970s sideboard/china cabinet. I spent some time helping Mum remove and sort its varied contents, and we came across a little 3B1 notebook containing a diary of a family holiday in January, 2000. It was the summer before my final year of high school, and my parents wanted to take one last family holiday before their eldest child moved away, so the six of us – Mum and Dad, me, my sister Melinda and my brothers Hadley and Rowan – spent three weeks driving around the South Island in our Isuzu Bighorn, visiting friends and family, staying in motels, doing a few tourist activities and seeing parts of the country that none of us had been to before.

Dad made a special roof-mounted luggage carrier for the Bighorn out of sheet metal. Part of it survives today as a barbecue cover. We crammed it full of bags, packed a chilly bin with Christmas left-overs, and set off. We drove down the West coast, crossed the Southern Alps at Haast Pass, zig-zagged around Fiordland and Southland, and drove back up the East coast, returning to Nelson via Blenheim. From Dad’s calculations in the back of the notebook, we covered three thousand, seven hundred kilometres. I volunteered to be the navigator, tracing our route on the map in felt pen. I also tried to keep everyone entertained by playing the harmonica I’d got for Christmas, though this wasn’t as well-receieved as I’d expected.

I think it was Mum’s idea to keep a diary of the journey, with a different family member writing in it each night. Scribbling down notes, hurrying to get the task out of the way so I could go back to whatever book I was reading then, I never imagined this little red notebook would become a time-capsule. This is the first piece of travel-writing I remember doing. It’s rough, rushed, teenage and sullen. It’s shit, basically. But reading it, I can’t help but smile at how much, and how little, I’ve changed in eleven years.

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