While on the Night Time Show in June of 2015, I asked listeners to use the #KidsTodayWillNeverKnow to mention a bunch of things kids of today and tomorrow will never experience. While thinking of my next blog topic I started to think of the good old days and how my parents used to take all my siblings and I on road trips.
Suddenly it hit me there’s tons of stuff kids today will never know about that sort of vacation. From packing the luggage and getting smacked for forgetting your toothbrush (you would use chewing sticks till the trip’s end) to where you sat in the back seat. As the youngest I was usually relegated to middle seat and that meant you had to endure the assault from to older brothers. You couldn’t see the scenery zoom by and feel the cool breeze when the midday sun came out.
A typical road trip happened on the second or third day after school closed for the term. My dad would be anxious to beat traffic and would be snapping at everyone. Mum would pack deliberately and slowly forgetting one thing or the other she needed to look for in the last minute. My brothers would be in and out of the shower in quick succession after getting dressed it was back to bed for another second of sweet sleep.
By the time we finally get in the Peugeot 504 Station Wagon and the oldest snapped the padlock on the other side of the gate, the air was still sweet and damp with dew. Then clouds slowly turning red as the sun started to ascend. My father would be grumpy and my mum would be silent for the first hour of the journey. We would always stop in Sagamu to fill our tank and to grab a beef roll, plantain chips and Samco chocolate drink.
The old toll gate was always hectic and the traffic would consist of the ancient Marco Polo buses of Chukwudi Transport Ltd, The Young Shall Grow going to and coming from the East and the J5 buses going heading to Bendel State. There were a few Mammy wagons as well, these always made me laugh with inscriptions like “No Condition Is Permanent” “Safe Journey” “To Be A Man Is Not Easy” and illustrations of Samson and the lion, Jesus Christ, Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Moses and the Ten Commandments.
The hunger pangs of having missed breakfast would set just as we passed the Welcome to Ondo road sign. My brothers were crafty and would always make sure I was the one who asked my father when we could stop to eat proper food. He would gruffly reply, “We’ll eat when we get to Ore, we would already be there if we had left at six like I wanted.” That statement would either go unanswered (Mum being asleep) but if she heard; the atmosphere in the car would suddenly feel stifling.
We would eventually arrive at Ore which is had several restaurants and stores, in case you wanted to buy a toothbrush or luxury soap. As we went into one restaurant we would hear nearly every Nigerian language and some from neighboring African countries. The variety was also evident in the meals on display and in different stages of preparation. After a quick bathroom break and breakfast we were soon back on the road.
I need you to picture this journey which was happening in the mid-eighties; there were no iPods or mp3 players, only cassettes of Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Fela, Sunny Ade, Sonny Okosun and Ebenezer Obey on repeat. The comics were hard to read too cause of the way the car jerked on the messed up expressway. So we sang along to the tunes and somehow they made the initial squabbles inconsequential and everybody would be laughing and joking about food poisoning on some previous trip or it would be a discussion on how the government hadn’t fixed the roads since Murtala Mohammed’s administration.
I was always awestruck when we crossed the Niger Bridge into Onitsha, there were always loads of hawkers at the other end yelling, “Bread! Groundnut! Bread! Banana! Bread! Guinea fowl egg! Bread!” I soon realized Nigerians loved bread and buying it on a lengthy journey was expected. It was never for us though but the people we were visiting.
Our destination was Port Harcourt and after driving all day we would arrive at night. My brothers would be asleep and I would sit quietly listening to my parents chat about things I could yet comprehend. All I knew was whatever animosity we started the day with was completely gone and they would be laughing and she would have her hand on his neck playing with his full Afro. Being Rivers my mother’s family members were all over the place. They would be offended if their sister and In-law stayed in a hotel so we’d pull up at one uncle’s house thankful for another safe trip and dreading the return leg in a week.
That was a typical road trip for us and I don’t remember many with my sister because she married and left and as the years passed so did my brothers. I went on many such trips with both parents sometimes it was just two of us on a luxurious bus. And there was always something memorable to hold on to; like the December our bus broke down near a police station. I heard funny Christmas carols coming from the windows of a cell. Another time, it was a woman who went into labor; my mother and the remaining women banded together to create a wall of wrappers. She had a girl, that’s how much I remember from that trip.
Kids today will never know how all that feels. If they go on road trips their noses will never leave the PSP, tablets or smartphones, they’ll order pizza when they get hungry and buses come with Televisions now.They can choose to stay home, or fly while the parents drive. Samco chocolate drink, Green Sands Shandy and Tree Top drinks all stopped being produced, so kids today won’t understand. They have GPS so they can’t get lost and use street smarts to find their way home; now they can simply call Uber cabs. If the relatives are not welcoming they have sites like HotelNowNow to choose from.
While I envy the technological and pharmaceutical advances today’s kid enjoys, I am afraid they will never enjoy the scenery like I did; even as the child in the middle of the backseat.
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