Road Trip!!!!!!

The long weekend is coming and with it the social requirement to "do something".  Apparently you can't have three legally mandated days off in a row without filling all the time allocated with some special activity or other so that at the end of the break you feel more exhausted than you would at the end of a normal weekend.  In keeping with this fine tradition of deliberately ruining public holidays I was approached with the possibility of not one but two separate activities to engage in.

Firstly a group of people who by now should know better suggested camping.  As icing on the cake it was hinted that another couple might also attend accompanied by their triplets who are under seven years old.  Secondly some wargaming friends were driving down to Canberra to compete in the advanced squad leader competition at CanCon 2015 and it was suggested I attend.  I did consider the drawbacks of being stuck in a car with a group of ill disciplined, whining brats with no self control but I decided to go to Canberra anyway. 

With five people of a male persuasion in a car heading towards a distant destination we had what is officially referred to as a road trip.  What is a road trip?  Essentially it is a type of movie where a bunch of almost certainly guys who are either too young to be allowed out alone or too old to care any more pile themselves into a vehicle with a notional destination.  Along the way there will be adventures, challenges, old paradigms will be threatened, new ones will start to emerge.  There will be encounters with wise strangers, encounters with inbred, psychotic strangers and at least one visit to a venue with poledancing because most of the people who watch these movies are adolescent males.

Women, as a general rule, do not indulge in road trips.  When a group of female friends feels like bonding they do it in a living room with a few bottles of wine.  Certainly the living room may be in a high end resort they have travelled to get to but the whole purpose is the living room and the wine.  This is because women are smart.  Men being less so feel that you can't really reconnect with that formerly old friend from college unless you are simultaneously fleeing down a deserted highway pursued by corrupt small town cops, the uncaught members of the Manson family and a crime gang to whom one of the group surprisingly owes a large amount of gambling money while simultaneously imbibing the wisdom of somebody whose deep life experience and knowledge of wholesome values still wasn't enough to get them out of Upper Sisterfuck, Arkansas.

In any road trip you have the "normal" guy.  You know the one who finds himself struggling with life because a lovely wife, wonderful children and a decent job somehow didn't turn out to be as fulfilling as he'd hoped.  You get the "rebel" who is usually the one who starts the road trip and who has obviously not matured appreciably since he was a sixteen year old persuading you to do a vodka shot in the eyeball.  He's the one who owes the money to the crime syndicate and has probably arranged for some of the party to be sold to organ traffickers en route.  There is the "tragic" one who is usually suffering because his wife/life partner/favourite goldfish has just died or divorced him or undergone unsuccessful gender reassignment surgery.  And finally there is the fat one whose role it is to fall in anything disgusting, trip over anything obvious, accidentally insult anyone even vaguely short tempered and wear a bermuda shirt.  More strategically his role is to make the rest of the group feel better about their messed up lives by giving them someone to look down on (he serves the same purpose for the audience as well).  Add vehicles, a long road and a spurious "destination" (plus of course the aforementioned pole dancing) and you have pretty much every road movie except possibly Thelma and Louise.

An actual road trip is quite pleasant by comparison.  It consists of a bunch of guys sweating in a car getting bored while travelling to somewhere they would rather be.  In this case the "somewhere we would rather be" is Canberra, and I'll bet that's a comment that doesn't get made too often.

For those who don't know, Canberra is the capital of my proud nation.  It was built midway between Sydney and Melbourne, the two largest cities in the land in the hopes that the inhabitants of both would be pleased the capital designation hadn't gone to the other.  In that, if nothing else, it appears to have succeeded.  Sitting awkwardly between Sydney and Melbourne like someone who has fallen between two stools Canberra is neither fish nor fowl.  Although when parliament is in session there is an argument to be made for claiming it is both fishy and foul.

There are reasons to go to Canberra even if you're not a federal politician.  It has all of the usual adornments of a purpose built national capital; galleries, war memorials, museums, monuments, embassies etc.  It's all very nice and impressive, all it really needs is for somebody to build a city around it.  Canberra is best viewed with not quite enough time to see everything.  That way you will leave wanting more.  It is about the only way you will leave wanting more.  Most people leave wanting less.  Canberra has that affect even on people who have never been there.

Still the Australia Day long weekend will see the population of Canberra increased by five as we head to Nerdapalooza for three days of gruelling game play.  I'm not even going to pretend we will see much of the city.  But before we settle into the gaming we have the road trip.  Five guys of middle years, with all that implies in the way of worn out bladders and intestinal disorders, stuck in a vehicle for a number of hours getting on each others nerves.  We'll have a little more space after we hit Goulburn mind you.  That's where the organ traffickers I've contacted catch up with us.