A SUMMER SOJOURN

Looking back on a comical family road trip from the UK to Italy undertaken in the 1990s, ANAND KAPOOR realises that adventures bring people closer.

- ANAND KAPOOR

IT’S TIMES LIKE THESE that make us stop and smell the proverbial roses. Until now, we were constantly running from one place to another to tick destinations off our bucket lists. Perhaps this grounding and stillness was the need of the hour.

This is also the time when industry experts come together and pontificate about ‘the next big thing’; most seem to agree on road trips. I have been on numerous road trips since childhood, and all this talk stirred up an early memory of a bus trip from the UK to Italy.

On one ridiculously early July morning in the 1990s, my mother, aunt, two female cousins, and I clambered into a bus that was to take us 2,155 kilometres away—to Rome. The journey time was nearly 25 hours, and like all travelling Indians of the time, we carried a multitude of bags and snacks. Our boarding point was outside the delightfully named but dilapidated Pineapple Inn in Stockport, an omen, I hoped, of sun and exotic adventures. We took the seats above the stairwell so we could stretch our legs over the banister. The coach eventually set off and would meander through the UK and France, to reach the Alps in the early evening.

The first five hours to Dover went smoothly, and we opened our lunch boxes for a traditional Indian lunch of curried potatoes and chapati. These were the days of the ferry, where you took to the high seas to reach Europe. One hour and forty minutes is all it took to cross over from boring Britian to exotic Europe. The sun was high in the sky when we queued up to leave the ferry.