Remember road trips to the beach.

Road trips are fast becoming a luxury, especially when it works out cheaper to fly, but you miss out on the journey. The much anticipated trips to the coast were a treat growing up, with all the excitement, and car sickness that came with it. Getting there is half the fun, as our parents may have said, although they didn't act like they were having fun when the " are we there yet", and " I need to wee'' started, usually just as we left town. Taking time to really see the scenery, unpack the particular greeness of the fields, work out how much blue and how much yellow makes that shade and wonder what might lurk in the depths of the sugar cane, was part of the joy of allowing imagination to run wild. No time for that now, as we live on the clock and even our leisure time is strictly prescribed by deadlines and timetables. Advice to the stressed to make time for fun, strikes me funny. The very idea of time set aside for fun is crazy, as if all the rest of time is of a different quality, of lesser enjoyment potential because its work time, so therefore filled with bureaucratic unpleasantness. Shouldn't we have fun every day?
Those road trips were filled with potential and adventure because they were unhurried and there were no deadlines, you arrived when you got there and there was always food when you eventually did arrive.
The old road to the coast was a road of dreams to the family and anticipation of the spoiling that grandparents are known for. I miss the innocence of that slower time, now its all about money, how much things cost rather than their value. What we have rather than who we are as people, and that's sad. When the dust settles on our economic woes, and we look at what's left, can we look back on lives filled with integrity and joy or has greed fuelled our time and tarnished our dreams?
In the mean time it's all about fuel economy, and saving every cent, and this may mean more shared family holidays, and more time on slow trips, where the journey is as important as the destination, and the experience and memory more important than what you bought that day.