Holiday in Dorset July 2010

After an enduring week of doing nothing, my parents and I headed down to the not-so-sunny south of England for our holiday. This was the first year of it being just us three since my sister moved to Wales. Our usual car journey consisted of me and her bickering in the back whilst my mum got annoyed with us and my dad’s lack of conversation. This year, however, was different.

When you’re young and have to stay in a car for around five hours, you usually sleep or eat or play with some amusing toy to pass the time. When you’re around ten, you have comics or music or spats with siblings to pass the time. The problem is being a teenager and travelling for five hours. Your in-between the stages of being too old for toys or magazines to occupy you for the journey and too old to have mastered the trick of staring out a window for hours which adults seem to do with ease.

I was in a dilemma of what to do. My magazine lasted about an hour before my head wanted to explode from reading while travelling. Conversation with my parents lasted about ten minutes, divided in to fragments throughout covering the topics of the weather, traffic and university (which was very short lived). And my iPod battery only lasts so long when you forget to charge it the night before. I attempted to do the adult thing of waiting patiently to arrive at the destination. Needless to say that lasted around five minutes before I was bored and like an idiot I hadn’t packed for such events as boredom in a confided space.

Luckily, I had time (two hours and seven minutes to be exact) to think about what to do on the way home. My ideas were; planning on how to avoid this ever happening again, finding better friends who text back and sleep.

The night before we left, I stayed up reading and watching the shocking programmes they play at night in the desperate hope I would sleep for most of the journey. Unfortunately this did not happen. Due to the “helpful” satnav giving directions every three minutes, sleep was a distant dream.  To put it simply, I am halfway to becoming an adult and must learn the art of staring out a window. Hopefully soon as many more car journeys ahead.