[As published in Summer 2025/26 BayBuzz magazine.]
Summer says “roadtrip”, and roadtrip screams “Summer of 1991” when I’d just got my full AND had enough money to put fuel in the tank. Me and my mates DJ, Paul and Saz borrowed DJ’s mum’s Volvo stationwagon and drove to Thames. No roadtrip has ever felt that free and easy. And of course that’s got to do with having no bills, no responsibilities, no dependents, and this glorious stretch between the end of school and the beginning of uni.
I want to take a roadtrip like that one again. It’ll mean no smart phone though, so no google maps, and no apps telling me where to stay and where to go. It’ll mean having to stop and ask for directions, and use street smarts and common sense to find good places to eat, and cheap places to sleep. (On that roadtrip we slept one night on benches in a birdwatching pontoon only to be woken up and kicked out by a DOC ranger at 5am. Another night we turned up unannounced at our old teacher’s bach and found him ‘entertaining’ a former school mate…probably should’ve phoned ahead!).
Going back to those days would be good for the soul and maybe this summer that’s what we need. Spiritual enlightenment aside, map-reading alone is better for us than relying on GPS. Navigating with old-fashioned paper maps is good for reasoning, decision making and visual-spatial integration. It engages your hippocampus and your parietal cortex, and tests your patience…especially when it comes to folding the A0 map back up again!
We should take it further. No late-model roadtrips for us. Let’s all buy ‘90s dungers. That’ll mean relearning how to drive a manual of course and how to do a hill start because there’ll be no warning beep when you leave the headlights on and the battery runs flat.
It’ll mean digging out Now That’s What I Call Music, rewinding it with a biro and shoving it in the tapedeck. Once it’s run through three times, it’ll mean having a sing song, remembering all the words to “The end of the world as we know it” or “Nobody compares 2U”. Harmonizing on the chorus. When we run out of songs, we can play I Spy.
On our old-school roadtrip, we’ll pick up hitch hikers just to keep us entertained.
Let’s do it. Let’s remember how to talk to strangers who are right there instead of friends who are in cyberspace.
Let’s buy notebooks so we can write stuff down and paperbacks so we can read stuff. We can get all our info from pamphlets in i-sites and stick them in scrapbooks labelled Roadtrip: Summer 1991.
We’ve gained so much with technological advances! Yes I know I know… but we’ve lost a lot too. We’ve lost our ability to ask for help from people we’ve never met before, use our cunning and curiosity to find a public loo in a new town, remember phone numbers and addresses.
We should spend the summer getting all our news from the few remaining community newspapers and listening to Dannevirke FM until we go out of range and lose the signal.
Let’s stop at pay phones to call Dad and ask him to send more money. Let’s cruise around unfamiliar streets looking for the one ATM so we can get cash out (because EFTPOS was still a foetus in ’91).
Let’s buy postcards and spend whole afternoons writing that one perfect line. Let’s buy stamps and find mailboxes in strange locations so the postmark looks intriguing when it arrives.
And we won’t photograph every single landmark, and every single landscape and every single latte. Let’s make a figurative roll of 36 snaps last all summer.
We’ll judge coffee shops by how interesting they look in real life rather than by their instagram feeds. We might not even go in. Instead we’ll fire up the thermette on the side of the road when we want a cuppa then enjoy it with biscuits we buy from markets in small towns we’ve never been in before and may never find again. Let’s buy fruit from roadside stalls, dropping our spare change into honesty boxes.
And when we find a nostalgic motel with candlewick quilts on the matching twin beds, let’s read out-of-date gossip magazines and play cards. We can talk to each other. Then we can go for a walk around town at dusk and laugh at how quaint and out-of-touch and old-fashioned the locals are.
For kids, a nineties adventure can offer so much: critical analysis, wayfinding skills, communication and courage, the beautiful magic of boredom and the way it ignites creativity. For oldies, a retro roadtrip can remind them of a time when serendipity made memories. For the rest of us, it’s a chance to live in the moment and go with the flow. It gives us an opportunity to unwind and defrag.
This summer, let’s hit the road, and cruise back in time. Let’s reconnect side-by-side as we drive through the countryside in our Toyota Starlet. Let’s get lost, then find ourselves again.
