A Most Memorable Family Trip with Kwik Fit*

When I was younger, we were lucky enough to live out in the Middle East and in Europe, which opened the door (excuse the driving pun) for many memorable family trips. Two of my most unforgettable, and favourite, trips involved travelling by car. Who doesn’t love a road trip?

I found it really hard to choose which trip to tell you about but I thought I’d go with the one from the Middle East. An Arabian adventure, if you will! We travelled from Oman, where we lived, up to Al Ain, then onto Abu Dhabi and then finally Dubai before heading back home to Oman again. I must have been about eight years old at the time, my middle brother six and my youngest brother two.

The first thing about the trip that I remember is that my dad used to write out directions on post it notes and have them stuck to the dashboard of the car – the original ‘sat nav’ before sat navs were commonplace in cars. He was always ahead of the times, was my dad.

Our Arabic family road trip is one of those trips which we still speak about now, even almost 20 years on. How scary is it to see that amount of time written down! On a side note, camel riding…also rather scary.

This trip included the first time I ever remember going to a zoo. My brothers and I were absolutely fascinated by the whole experience. Living abroad meant that our childhoods were slightly different from those back in the UK and we often didn’t get to experience the same things.

Another memorable moment of the trip was buying a little clay pot at the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere, on a dirt track. I still had the pot until very recently – I think it escaped and ran away during one of our many house moves. There was also a hole in the floor toilet incident around the same time as the clay pot purchase, but we won’t go into those details!

My brothers and I liked to pass time, on our family road trips, with lots of car games, such as the licence plate game and I spy, but we also had the old school, retro gameboys and our trusty CD players (hello Spice Girls in the later years). The problem is once our devices were out of battery, that was it unless you had a lifetime supply or AA batteries with you. There was no wireless charging or USB ports back in the late 90’s.

I remember my dad putting in portable DVD screens, once I’d left home and gone to university, in an attempt to entertain my youngest brother on a planned road trip. I remember thinking how clever and advanced that was. And now it has moved on even further with the introduction of tablets and smartphones. Technology is so accessible and is changing the way we live our lives.

It has been a lot of fun looking back on such a special family trip. KwikFit are encouraging you to do the same in order to enter into their competition to win money towards your ultimate, dream family trip!

You can enter Kwik Fit’s amazing competition here (please note the T&C’s on their website and you must tell them all about a memorable trip of yours to be entered).

We, along with some other wonderful bloggers, also came up with some top nostalgic lane road trip tips for you, which you can check out here.

Feel free to let us know too, in the comments section below, what your most memorable road trip was!

*This post was written in collaboration with Kwik Fit.