Opinion: Easter Family Road Trip the greatest feat of human endurance

COMMONWEALTH Games? Puh-leeze. Nothing tests the body and soul greater than the Easter Family Road Trip, writes Matthew Condon.

Family road trips can be an endurance test.

THERE’S nothing like an international sporting event to remind us of the nobility of human endurance.

Throughout the Commonwealth Games, we have seen men and women of the world flex and fly and tumble and grimace and suffer and cry in anguish and in victory in titanic displays of the towering courage of the human heart – and that was just the table tennis competition.

Human endurance has also been celebrated in literature and in art across centuries; this eternal struggle we have not just to survive, but to overcome our adversities and triumph – be it in life, in the pool, on the track or in the dank corners of some Surfers Paradise bar.

But nothing, absolutely nothing, tests the body and the soul greater than the Easter Family Road Trip.

No ultra-marathons, no hoisting more than your body weight above your head, no sinew-busting, hamstring-severing physical exertion exceeds the effort of the EFRT. Yes, read that again – EFRT.

You can have your wheelbarrows full of Commonwealth Games medals.

The reward for making it through the EFRT is the fact that you are still alive. Let that sink in. Actual continued LIFE is your reward.

I would have been grateful for some survival pointers prior to our recent EFRT.

I would have appreciated someone telling me that it was not a great idea to spend the first night of the EFRT, having travelled just a few hundred kilometres from home, in a World Heritage national park, having not checked the weather forecast. And having not noticed that our new super-cheap pop-up tents were only water resistant, and not waterproof.

And having not practised how to repack a pop-up tent after use, particularly a drenched pop-up tent, alongside the drenched pillows, blankets, mattresses, suitcases, shoes and children.

There is no sadder sight than a grown man wet to the bone wrestling a tangle of polyester and internal hoop poles to the ground, the poles scissoring and popping at all angles, refusing to collapse into a packable flat sphere.

Human wrestling doesn’t cut it against a contest with a pop-up tent.

I would have been grateful if someone had pointed out that when your five-year-old quietly suggests he’d like to go to the bathroom, he needs to be listened to with all the seriousness of crisis talks between major nations.

And that when you briefly come out of your EFRT haze five minutes later and say, “What was that? You need to go to the loo?” and he replies, “No, it’s fine, I don’t need to go any more,” having not left his booster seat, you know that any EFRT requires alertness and the utmost vigilance.

It would have been nice to know, too, about the outback highway “finger wave” – the gentle and barely perceptible lift of the index finger off the steering wheel when another vehicle on an EFRT of its own passes. And that you don’t have to feel guilty when you get a finger wave directed at you and don’t wave back in time.

And that when you finger wave the next 10 vehicles that cross your path and don’t get a single one in return, that it’s not personal.

Olympic Games. Commonwealth Games. Forget it.

When you hear, “When are we getting there?” just 42 minutes into a 4000km round trip, you understand the true nature of athleticism and human endurance.

Email Matthew Condon