The Summer Holidays Are Just Around The Corner & Kids Have Started Their Countdown.

The excitement of a family holiday trumps all.

Even the kids who are really too cool to think anything other than X-Box etc as being Da thing, are quivering with excitement at the prospect of going away on a family holiday during summer.

The summer school holidays were, oh so far away the other day and yet, now they are so tantalizingly close that concentrating on school work for the remainder of the term is hard. Of course teachers the world over are smart people and most of them have scheduled a barrage of tests in the last month of the school year.

Seeing a typical newly minted teenager's workload pales anything we do as adults. Every week a test is had, be it in Maths, English, German or... and at times I think the parents do take strain along with their children. They are the ones supervising and scheduling homework and study time. Not an easy task when competing with a teenager's new social awakening ( suddenly the girls / boys are attractive and not just a nuisance ) and of course there's the lure of technology!

The kids or mini-executives bravely soldier on through the ever so useful trigonometry, dangling participles, Romulus & Remus and the winner of oh, so useful in real life after school which is that eternal brain teaser:

Daisy is on train A. Train A is going a gazillion kph one way, and train B is going a gazillion and a bit the other way. At what point on the track does Daisy see Dougie who is travelling on Train B?

well, you get the drift and hands up those of you who have ever used this type of logic in real life? Of course in Germany there often is no train at all due to various strikes...fat lot of good the riddle does there!

Most kids don't mind at all where the family goes on holiday. As long as they are together and I tend to think that most would even enjoy pitching a tent in the back garden and vacationing there.

Bob vividly recalls many a drive to Cape Town setting off in the middle of the night. Isn't that usually the most exciting bit of it? I remember various trips to the sea, be it in Yugoslavia ( shows my age, doesn't it ) or Italy. Days of sheer joy playing in the sand, eating pizza and playing cards.

Parents the world over are also counting down the days until the start of the summer holidays, with just one thorn among the mix. As exciting as long car drives are, there is always that combat zone on the back seat between various siblings.

In the days of yore, the space between the front and back seats was short enough to allow a arm to swing backwards in order to stop a fight, but the modern chariots make this impossible...Happy driving!

Biggi