Output of: post tomorrow-i-drive-my-family-across-vietnam
Tomorrow I drive my family across Vietnam
Tomorrow is Saturday. Tomorrow my family gets in the car and we start driving south.
We have done trips before. A few hundred kilometres, a weekend, back by Sunday night. This is not that. This is Hanoi to Hoi An to start, and if we are still strong when we get there, we keep going. Da Nang, Nha Trang, all the way to Ho Chi Minh City if the road and the people in the car allow it. Three weeks, give or take. The first time we have ever traveled the length of the country by car.
And I am the only one who can drive it.
the honest part
I am not writing this from the other side. I am writing it the night before, with the bags half packed and the route open in another tab.
The thing I keep coming back to is that I am the single point of failure. If I am tired, we do not move. If I get sick, we stop. There is no second driver to tap in on hour four. A thousand kilometres and more, and all of it runs through one person who also has to show up for work in the afternoons.
That is the fear. Not the distance. The distance is just kilometres. The fear is being the only thing holding the whole trip up.
so I am not going to be a hero
Here is the plan, and the plan is deliberately small.
I drive in the morning. Three to four hours, done before the day gets hot and before I get bored of the road. Then we stop wherever we stopped, and I work the afternoon like any other day. No 700km push. No "let's just make it to the next city" at 9pm with everyone quiet in the back. If a morning is bad, the morning is short.
This is the same trick I have written about over and over. The 300ml cup that is too small to keep me still. The 6:10 workout that is tiny on purpose so the streak survives. The constraint is not a compromise I am settling for. The constraint is the entire reason this is possible at all. A big scary trip becomes a series of small ordinary mornings, and small ordinary mornings I can do for three weeks.
this is the real test
A few weeks ago I wrote about missing a Friday post because I drove 500km with my family. At the time that felt like the thing that broke the routine. It was not. It was the warm-up.
This is the real one. Everything I have said on this blog about rails, about routine, about showing up when the conditions are not perfect, gets tested now. All of it was built for a life that stays in one place. Now the place moves a hundred kilometres a day and I get to find out what actually survives.
My guess is that the answer is not "all of it" and not "none of it." My guess is that the minimum version holds. One walk. The multivitamin. A short post when I can get one out. The identity survives even when the program does not. But that is a guess. I have not run it yet.
the rule, provisional
Do not go dark. That is the whole commitment for the next three weeks.
The posts might be short. They might land on the wrong day. The workout might shrink to a walk around a strange town at dusk. Fine. The metric was never whether every day was perfect. It was whether the blog is still alive in three months, and whether the label "I do this" is still intact when I get home.
I am writing this before I know if it works. That is the point. Anyone can write the tidy recap after the fact, once the ending is safe. I would rather put the plan down now, out loud, and be accountable to it when I am tired somewhere near Nha Trang and the easy thing is to skip everything.
I will report back. When we get home, or from the road if a quiet afternoon shows up, there will be a follow-up: what the plan got right, what the road broke, and whether one driver and a short-morning rule can actually carry a family the length of a country.
For now, the bags are almost packed. Tomorrow I drive.