Traveling with kids

So we started the vacation on a fraught note. A and I had been having a huge fight related to itso 

our prep was more than a little last minute. I had been unsuccessfully fighting off a viral for two

weeks and was pre-exhausted for the vacation. On the other hand, given the life I lead, that’s par 

for the course. Our train tickets didn’t come through, so we decided to drive through. The friend '

who was to accompany us on this jaunt had to drop out since her back doesn’t permit long car 

journeys. So we set off, plus the kids’ common best friend, packed into the car bought for road 

trips like sardines.

Honestly I wasn’t sure how we would weather the journey. Chubbocks gets car sick and is a notoriously poor traveler, so we usually dose him with an anti-vomiting medicine and leave him free on the back seat armed with a stack of old newspapers, barf bags. The three younger ones were settled on the middle seat, feet propped on the suitcase stuffed between their seat and ours, and an assortment of snacks, books and juices for company. We made remarkable time on the onward journey.

The days at the camp flew by, wading into the icy-cold Ganga river, playing on the rocks and learning to make them skip across the water, kayaking, doing the Flying Fox and valley traverse, singing around the evening bonfire or just lying on the camp bed in the tent in the stiflingly hot afternoons, lulled into a state of somnolescence.

The journey back was something we were reasonably comfortable with, given the onward journey. At most it’ll take an hour or so longer we thought. WRONG!! First of all, every single person who has visited Rishikesh that weekend seemed to have decided to start the journey back that day. Added to that the impossibly narrow roads of the small towns through which the route goes, the staccato, band-aid nature of the so-called highways in UP - in which a good road is built for about a kilometer at which point it turns into 3 levels of road, none of them tarred and most with boulders, massive pits and unexpected turnoffs - expressly for the purpose of torture-testing for a car and its tires (seriously, it could be a business proposition!), your cursing vocabulary or the limits of human endurance! It took 6 hours to cover the first 100 km!

We had planned to stop for a latish lunch around 4 pm at a midway point where we had spotted a Haldirams and other eateries. Instead, thanks to the excruciating pace of the journey, we reached the place only at 7 pm that evening. Meanwhile, post an 8:30 am breakfast, the kids had sustained themselves on a couple packs of Britannia fruit cake and a pack of chips. They had even eschewed juice and water once we explained that we didn’t know where we would be able to stop or find a clean loo. To our pure joy, surprise and respect, the kids behaved like unfledged angels on the entire 11 hour marathon journey! Not once were there yells, moans of being bored, questions about ‘are we there yet?’ There were occasional queries about when we were reaching the midway point since mice has taken over all our stomachs. The rest of the time, they were busy playing with each other, singing funny songs, riddling, reading…at some point, they all slept off using each other as pillows. Puddi curled up like a cat between the seat and the suitcase. Bojjandi used her hip as his pillow. And R used Bojjandi’s hip as his headrest, while Chubbocks colonized the back seat.

It’s actually given me a new love and joy in the kids to find that they were resilient enough to adjust to such a long journey with such little trouble. Looking forward to more road trips now!