I remember as a teenager if you gave me a choice of driving down to the coast with my parents or sticking prickly pear thorns into my eyes, the second would be infinitely more palatable.
Actually, I would pay you for the pleasure of flinging myself naked and face down into a prickly pear bush rather than having to sit in the back of the car with my mother and two siblings, my father driving and my ditsy grandmother in the front passenger seat.
Mile after interminable mile of “are we there yet?” and wrestling with brothers and sisters to while the time away. When we were sick of eating naartjies we would stop for lunch.
The Women of the House would have prepared a picnic basket. This consisted of a flask of weak, milky coffee, another of cold water to dilute the Oros. To eat, rusks, slap premade sarmies, and boerewors that were colour-matched to the coffee.
For a treat we’d stop in, say, Bloemfontein. While my father saw to the car, we’d go next door to the corner caff where we’d use the loo, have free reads of the comics and order Mixed Grills.
My father didn’t see the point of staying over in expensive hotels, “as long as the bed is clean”, he’d say. Nothing wrong with that principle. In fact, a Holiday Inn is far preferable to those interminable B&Bs that littered the roadsides of virtually every country of the world. You know the ones: single beds with thin foam rubber mattresses and that bedding that gives off enough static to jump start a Studebaker; ‘Dot’s Specials’ on the plate for dinner, a fridge that contains boxed wine and a chatty husband that’s probably consumed half of the content of the box, loves his own jokes and won’t go away.
This Easter I’ll be ignoring prickly pear bushes. I’ll be picking quinces from my garden and thinking up new recipes.
And perhaps also driving down secret roads in rural Gauteng to discover more delicious hideaways.
