A tech-free driving holiday. Pleasure or pain?

In a month, our family is setting off on a driving holiday from Adelaide to Brisbane – an old-fashioned kind of driving holiday, only with seat belts.

Our accommodation will be a combination of motels, caravan parks, a houseboat, relatives’ rumpus room floors and one nice hotel. The kids will only be allowed to take what can fit in their schoolbags – and that includes swimmers and a towel.

There is a lot of driving on this driving holiday, and here’s the thing – I’m thinking about doing it without the aid of electronic devices. No iPad, no DSi, no on-board DVD. I’m serious. The question is, am I sane?

You see, I have visions of our band of five bonding over games of ‘I spy,’ and ‘I went fishing,’ (you know, the memory game where you take a sandwich, some bait, a hat etc – endless family fun there).

I grew up watching The Brady Bunch and loved how they drove to the Grand Canyon – eight of them, plus Alice, all in the big brown station wagon (don’t tell me those children were all appropriately restrained). Even at the end of the journey, they were still singing, ‘row row row your boat’ in a perfectly-pitched round. It would have been very different (and extremely dull TV) if they’d all had their noses in their Nintendos wouldn’t it?

My sister Nicole says I’m either batshit crazy or Amish. She remembers our family driving holidays as a living hell and reckons a Gameboy or five could only have improved things. If I’m honest, she could be right, but I believe the fights over who was breathing whose air, the car-sickness and the dodgy service station meals have formed part of our family’s rich tapestry of life. (Now there’s a sentence that’ll make you sick even if the servo sausage rolls didn’t.)

I want to give our kids stories to tell, and the best stories aren’t always the blissful ones. One of my husband’s favourite dinner party tales involves his father dropping the spare tyre on his head somewhere between Tamworth and Armidale. How can I deny our children similar hilarious anecdotes?

Kate Hunter is an advertising copywriter with 20 years experience and hundreds of ads under her belt. She’s also written two novels for young readers: Mosquito Advertising, The Parfizz Pitch and Mosquito Advertising, The Blade Brief. You can visit Kate’s website here or follow her on twitter here.

Did you love or loathe driving holidays? Do you remember driving holidays that you went on as a kid?