My first Road Trip

It’s hard to believe that it’s already August 7th. It has been one month since I arrived in Warri. This one month has gone by pretty fast and I have a lot of stories to tell but I am still very busy with settling down, both in the work front and in the home front so I apologize for being behind in sharing my experiences with you all. In the work front, the co worker that I am taking over from is taking a two year leave of absence starting yesterday, so I had been busy doing a complete handover as it will not be very easy to contact him now that he is gone. In the home front, I have been meeting with sales people and designers every evening after work trying to pick curtains for the new house. I can’t seem to make up my mind, mostly because of how expensive these curtains are! Whew! I so should have bought curtains from Bed Bath and Beyond! My weekends have been busy with trips to Lagos or Abuja for one thing or the other. Anyways back to my story for today…. “My first road trip”.
Within ten days of my being back in Nigeria I embarked on a road trip from Warri, Delta State to Owerri, Imo State. I would estimate the distance between these two towns to be about 150 miles….. maybe a little more. So this drive which is the equivalent of the drive from Houston to Austin, TX will not normally be a big deal or blog worthy but for two issues. One; the fact that there is a lot of heat in the south eastern part of Nigeria due to increased cases of kidnapping. Two; the fact that armed robbery on Nigerian highways has always made road trips quite risky. Since there were no flights from Warri to Owerri, a road trip was my only option.
Why did I want to go to Owerri you may ask? A few months before I relocated back to Nigeria, my cousin had informed me that she will have her wedding in Owerri on July 17th. I promised her that I will try my best to make it, if at all possible. So when I arrived in Warri and was assigned a temporary car and driver, I quickly asked if I could use the car to go outside of Warri. My on boarding HR looked at me and asked; where would you want to take the car? I told him about the wedding in Owerri and he said he would make some inquiries and get back to me.
He got back to me on Thursday, just two days before the wedding, I called my aunty who lives in Owerri and made arrangements to spend Saturday night at her house after the wedding. Incidentally my aunt relocated back to Nigeria about this time last year. Now I had the means to make the trip, so I started to talk to God about the tough part. I prayed constantly to God for my safety, but I was still so scared that on Saturday morning when I got into the car and my driver asked for us to pray before we started the journey, I found my voice shaking while I was praying.
I refused to let fear keep me from reuniting with my relatives who I knew would be at the wedding and helping make my cousin’s special day, so I embarked on the trip. Surprisingly the roads were not as bad as I expected. Most of the roads were under construction on one side but the side that was open was pretty smooth. We drove a little slowly, about 80km/hr because the company car was equipped with a tracking / safety device that set limits on the driver’s speed. We also had to stop after every 2 hours and rest the car for about 20 minutes.

We ended up spending about 4.5 hours on the road. The only snag in the journey, which was a major snag for me, was the lack of clean rest rooms on the way. When I couldn’t hold my pee anymore, I asked to use a restroom at the gas station where we had stopped to rest the car. I am not exaggerating when I say that it was the nastiest place I had ever had to pee in my entire life so here are some tips. When going on a road trip in Nigeria, if you can help it, drink very little or no fluid! (I did this on my way back and held my pee until I arrived in Warri. If you have to drink something, take a little bucket to pee in and then throw the pee in the toilet. Seriously, if I didn’t have a strong stomach I would have puked in that bathroom.

As you can deduce from the fact that I am still blogging, I travelled to Owerri and back to Warri safely. I thank God for his mercies, but the risk was quite real as I arrived to work on Monday morning and learned that the company had issued a security alert to all staff on Friday warning against taking any trips to Abia state, which is very close to Imo state because of several recent cases of kidnapping. I thanked God for journey mercies and will probably not been taking any road trips any time soon……or so I thought. I did take two more road trips two weeks later but that will be part of another story. Until then stay blessed.