The Last Family Road Trip

An old notebook at my parents' house brings back memories from a decade ago - and reveals my early attempts at travel writing.

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.

6/1/2000
(Missed “Stargate”). Drove around Queenstown for a while, got some stuff for lunch, drove out to Glenorchy for the “Dart River Jet Safari” thing. Had lunch by the lake, looked around a shop that sold bits of possums and bits of possum made into expensive hats for Russians, apparently. The bus left the Jetboat centre just after 1:00 and got to the launching area in about two minutes…we got dressed up like Darth Vader in these waterproof hooded things and put on lifejackets (like Darth Vader wearing a big, puffy orange vest). We got snapped by a Dart River photographer, and shuffled into a boat with a family of four from Australia and the driver, James (callsign: “J.B.”). Basically we went up the river (from the head of lake Wakatipu) for a couple of hours, stopping occasionally for James to talk about the river, the mountains, and Europeans making commercials for chocolate. At the boundary of Mt. Aspiring National Park, we stopped and turned back, going a fair bit faster, narrowly missing rocks and inflatable kayaks, spinning around, getting wet, squishing Mum against the rail, that sort of thing.
(Small jump in time)
Eventually we went up the gondola, luged a couple of times, went down the gondola, looked around some more, found Pizza Hut, ate some pizza (of course), got back to the camp, did some sleeping. End.

As you can see, I could be a right little twat at times (but really, can you blame me? Spending days on end in a cramped car with two twelve-year-old brothers? Have you met my brothers?).

12/1/2000
Got up, had breakfast, packed car, said our goodbyes to Russell, Sarah, and Anna, then took a few photos of Invercargill before setting off along the “Southern Scenic Route” (the one with mainly long, dusty, gravel roads…), eventually finding our way to the “scenic” bits. We experienced Waipapa Point, Slope Point, Curio Bay – with a break for a “light snack” at Porpoise Bay – The Cathedral Caves, and Purakaunui Falls. By Owaka, it being nearly quarter to four, we had to stop for some food (all we’d had for “lunch” was cheese and crackers). We passed through Balclutha and some more stuff like that before ending up in Dunedin. There were a few mixups with street names before we got to Ianthe and Stu’s (and Ian the boarder’s) place. Hadley and Rowan dragged me to the saltwater pool somewhere down the road. Watched some TV. Ate some lasagne, rhubarb crumble, coleslav, etc. (Thanks, Ianthe). Watched some more TV. Slept, I think. Woke up. Slept more, I think. Woke up, maybe. Slept, probably. Maybe all the sleeping and waking and sleeping and waking was a dream…
Fraser has left the page.

I swear I’m a nicer person than I sound in that last entry. I’ve stopped using “sarcastic quotation marks”, too. The Southern Scenic Route really is fantastic, though I’d recommend driving it after a good night’s sleep, and in a vehicle with fewer than two family members.

18/1/2000
Well, we got up, packed our stuff, said goodbye to Kerry, Paul, and some animals, and took off. We bypassed the Christchurch-via-everywhere else route and pretty much went in a straight line, crossing the Rakaia gorgge, which is big and made of rocks. We hit the city about 11:30 and had a look ’round the old Linwood City mall which is now called “Eastgate” or something (it’s big but not made of rocks, I think). Mum and Dad decided to beat the lunch rush, so we went to a Turkish kebab place which happened to be there. I think Mum and Dad had Souvlakis, Hadley and Rowan had burgers, I had an iskander or iskandar or something, although I ended up with some of Mum’s souvlaki, which was bigger than the photo had suggested (maybe they have an evil plot going on, but I can’t figure that one out). After Eastgate we did “The Palms”, which was bigger and also made partly of rocks, probably some concrete and steel as well. Eventually we got to Uncle Paul’s place, had a swim and caught up with Uncle Paul, Aunty pauline, cousin Dan, his girlfriend Mitzi, and their boarder Angela from Switzerland. Had some tea. Looked at photos of various holidays. Slept a while.

Two days later, we were back home. I had my final year of high school, then moved away for university. The family has got together many times since, but that was our last long holiday.
The towns we visited have grown or declined; friends and family have relocated, and more recently, earthquakes have forever altered an entire city, but the South Island is still a big, green, beautiful place. In the same way, all of us have aged and changed, but in many ways, we’re still who we were back then.

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