By the middle of 2020 our house had stopped being a house. It was an office with a kitchen attached. I was on calls from seven in the morning until whenever the last deployment went through, and the kids had each found a screen and grown into it. Meals arrived in paper bags at the front door. Nobody went anywhere, because there was nowhere to go.
I remember the exact moment I’d had enough. It wasn’t dramatic. I walked past the lounge on a Saturday and all three of them were on separate devices, in the same room, not talking, and I thought: this is not what I want them to remember about being small.
The phone call
When the restrictions loosened I called two mates and said, more or less, “I need to get out of this house and I’m taking you with me.” That was the whole plan. We had no route, no gear and no idea what we were doing. We agreed on every second weekend and we’ve stuck to it more or less ever since.
The wrong car
At the time I drove a BMW X5. Lovely thing on tar. Useless the moment the road turned to dirt, and I knew it, and Frik kept telling me so. It took a few weeks of him nagging before I did something about it, and it hurt to do it, but I traded the X5 for an Isuzu D-Max. A proper bakkie. Low range, ground clearance, and a load bin for the coolers. I expected to miss the BMW. I didn’t, not for a day.
Two months in
In those first two months we saw more of our own province than in the ten years before. Roads that don’t exist on Google Maps. Hills twenty minutes from home that nobody I know has ever stood on top of. Friends came, then their families, then people we’d never met who’d seen a video and asked if they could tag along.
Why there’s a website
Eric had been on a couple of the trips by then, and one evening at the fire he said the thing I’d been thinking: we should be writing this down. So this is that. Forgotten Routes is where we keep the stories, the routes and the mistakes, so that the next person doesn’t have to make the same ones.
Pack a bag, put the phone on silent, and come and see what’s out there.
