Why I Must Be The Worst Travel Companion In The World

I have a huge amount of sympathy for Grant, and so should you. Over the last weekend, he had to spend more than 24 hours in a car with me, and no one should have to do that. And so, here are the reasons why I must be the worst person to travel (in a car) with.

As a side note, I like to think that I am not that bad to travel with outside of the car – ie. On plane rides, trips where I meet up with people at the destination, etc. However, I cannot vouch for myself. This would require someone vouching for me.

1. “It’s So PRETTY!” I love traveling by car as a passenger, mostly because I am the kind of person who finds most scenery pretty. Aside from, say, the trip to PE which I must have done at least 50 times over the last seven years, I will always find new and wonderful things that I think are gorgeous. Even if it is something that I have seen before, chances are that I haven’t seen it in that light, that season or at that angle before. And I get ridiculously excited about it. To the extent that I was forbidden from uttering those words on the return trip from Durban. “Instead,” Grant advised, “how about you tell me when you don’t find something pretty.” Needless to say, those words were not uttered.
   
   
2. Photographer on Board. I restrained myself this trip, and Grant understood that I was restraining myself. Because of the whole “It’s So PRETTY” problem described above and the fact that I tend to like to take photographs of pretty things, car trips with me could very easily end up being long experiences. I swear, if Grant had been willing to pull over every time I wanted to take a photo, we would never have arrived in Durban on time to attend the wedding. And sadly, taking photos from a moving car that has windows and a windscreen that are less than crystal clear just does not work. This means that I didn’t actually end up taking very many photos of the trip to and from Durban. Which is a real shame. I totally want to head out in that direction (maybe just an hour from Grahamstown) at 7am again just to get the picture of the mist flowing over the hills and mountains. I cannot remember seeing anything more gorgeous in my lifetime.
   
   
3. Sleeping Beauty. There is nothing quite like a car trip to make me want to fall asleep. Especially when the trips involve getting up well before my usual waking hour – like getting up at 6am or 04:45. There is little that can be done then to keep me awake – coffee, Red Bull and Monster have no effect. Somehow I did manage to stay awake during both trips with Grant, but there were long moments of considering just giving in to the sleep that was threatening, and blinking lasted a lot longer than it usually does, since it was such an effort to keep my eyes open.
   
   
4. Bathroom Breaks. Another thing that I am terrible at, though to be fair I don’t have much of a choice in how my body handles itself. I tend to be terrible at needing to take bathroom breaks. Often at the most inconvenient of times, like just as we pass the last petrol station that we will see for the next hundred k’s or so. I can remember a number of trips where this has wreaked havoc – my trip to Yosemite with my parents and tagging along on a drive to Cape Town in my fourth year being only a few. While this is fine when I am on my own, it is absolutely awful when driving with someone else, particularly when you have somewhere to be and are trying to get there as quickly as possible.
   
   
5. Navigation. I have discovered that I suck at navigation. Apparently I cannot blame this on my HTC (though I am determined that it does not help matters) but only on myself and my lack of navigational skills. I am useless at judging distance (turn in 130m could be the next road or could be the one down there… I don’t know) and I am terrible at reading maps. The number of times that we took a wrong turn because I couldn’t tell what the GPS wanted me to do was embarrassing and I think I have been taken off navigational duties for future trips.

But, despite my terrible travel companion skills, we managed to make it to Durban and back in two pieces (one for me and one for him) and had a weekend that we can both look back on fondly. More on our Durban weekend later in the week (or month)!

Descending into Boredom

I don't know why I ever trust the people who choose Oscar nominations. They are so narrow-minded to begin with, looking for a particular type of movie to fit in with their categories. But it's not just that they close themselves off to the awesomeness of certain types of movies that gets me. It is the movies that end up being picked, even often end up winning the Oscars that truly blow my mind (in a bad way).

Take, for example, The Descendants. You can't really say that it had a great cast. Yes, there was George Clooney, who is a stud and is awesome. I am not denying that fact. But he was expected to carry the show on his name alone, and he actually didn't pull off a great performance. I thought that the girl who played the older daughter was halfway decent, but I found Clooney to be, frankly, flat. His character was supposed to be dull, work obsessed, I get that. But when he finds out that plot to the entire story, it should kind of shake things up a little. Which he tries to do. And fails. His character never seems to move out of first gear and it makes the show painful to watch.

Then there comes the story. The story which does seem to get into second gear with a lot of effort and then still goes absolutely nowhere. For those who do not know what the movie is about, I will tell you no more than what you see in the trailer. It is about a man (Clooney)  whose wife ends up on life support in a hospital when she gets into a boating accident. He is left to look after the two children while he tries to sort out his life, his wife's affairs and sell a large piece of land that he and his family have inherited through the generations. Oh, and he finds out that his wife has been cheating on him. This is all in the trailer, as I said, so I have given absolutely nothing away there. And the sad thing is, there is nothing more to give away. That is the entirety of the movie, squashed into a 3 minute trailer that was far more entertaining than the two and a half hour show. It suggests interesting topics, but the interest never materialises.

Of course, taking  place in Hawaii, you always knew that it was going to be a visual movie, a movie filled with timelapses and beautiful scenery. Which it was, to some extent. But I could appreciate the vastness of the land and the beauty of it more when it was integrated into the story. Like when Clooney and his daughters are  looking over the land that belongs to them, contemplating what selling it would mean, and the camera pans over the land numerous times - you can see why it would be something difficult to let go of, and you can see why the land should be treasured. You can't see that so much when the scene changes randomly to clouds floating over the ocean or over the shoreline. A lot of the most beautiful, most visual scenes are completely separated from the narrative, and it feels like they have just been put there to be pretty. Beauty is one thing, but it should add to the movie rather than be placed there for beauty's sake.

As you can tell, The Descendants did not meet my expectations. And that is the problem with the movies that are chosen for the Oscars. They are chosen for reasons that we are not aware of, and they raise your expectations for the films. Expectations that are often not met. Perhaps they should have a category for dull artsy movies that make you think twice about life. I would certainly put this and Never Let Me Go into that category.