They say travelling together is the best test of any relationship, but I don’t see why there needs to be a test. A relationship is a pass/fail situation, surely.
He’s also joined the New Zealand Motor Caravan Association. They have winged stickers and wave at each other when passing on highways and byways with the over-the-top friendliness of a motorised wife-swapping club.
Road trips are a Kiwi rite of passage, perhaps best experienced by the young. When you are young, your spine is made of elastic. You can sleep in the back of a Holden station wagon and leap from the open boot in the morning like a little blonde gazelle with a red wine-stained mouth.
As you get older, things start to fall apart. Your joints creak (sometimes they suddenly go, ‘crack!’ like light artillery fire in the distance heralding the arrival of the enemy, Death). You make an ‘Ooft’ noise when you stand up. You need to pee in the middle of the night, in the middle of a meeting, in the middle of walking across a field. Eating cheese gives you nightmares. Thick people make you angry. If you sleep funny or just turn your head a bit too fast, you’re kinked up for days.
You really should stay at home and spare the world your intolerance and decrepitude, but this is also the age when people start saying things like ‘‘50 is the new 30’’ and other rubbish. 50 is not the new 30. At 30 I smoked at Olympic level, regularly stayed up dancing until 5am on the weekends and had a pie and a V for breakfast most days. Now I just have that for breakfast once a week because I’m a grown up.
WOMAD will be the first gig I have been to in 3 years. The first time I have been out of Otago, been around more than 12 people at once (there are 12 people in my office). I need to relearn how to interact with humans again in a way that doesn’t involve terror. And I will be terrified if there is random hugging.
The world is coming to the Bowl of Brooklands in New Plymouth for three days from March 17-19. There will be a packed schedule of music, events, talks, food and drink and thousands of people. It will be the most exciting thing to happen to me all year.
But first we have to get there without killing each other.
A road trip can be many things. It can be like The Last of Us; Ellie and Joel travelling through post-apocalyptic cities dodging freaky beings with cordyceps sprouting from their heads, or heading into the unknown — Into the Wild, or a bad trip like Easy Rider. Actually, the common theme here seems to be dangerous mushrooms. Avoid the mushrooms and you’ll be fine.
Whatever variety your road trip is, there are some things that remain essential: snacks (not fungi) are the key to stress-free road tripping; games: I-spy, spot the road cone, New Zealand natural-hazard bingo: what will it be? A landslide? A flood, tsunami, earthquake, forest fire? But the biggest issue to face any road trip is the question of who is in charge of the music.
‘‘Obviously the driver is in charge,’’ says the Casanova.
Like fun he is. If I ever have to hear Bill Callahan’s Too many birds again, it will be too soon.
The driver should not pick music that will actively irritate the passenger in a confined space. The opposite of tinkly plonk plink, my musical taste runs to the loud and shouty. There must be ACDC in the playlist, and Tool.
When it comes to podcasts, the Casanova prefers to enhance his word power with delightful explorations of etymology such as Something Rhymes with Purple while I like a juicy murder podcast (some poor chump gets into a vehicle with a monster).
Oh well, if things go awry, at least we know it will make a good one.
