Sunscreen and long drives

"If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunsreen would be IT"
- Everybody's Free (to wear sunscreen), Mary Schmich

From where I'm sitting, truer words have never been spoken.
I headed to San Juan, La Union over the Easter weekend to meet some friends for some sun and sand, and in their case some surfing.
I only realized the idiocy of forgetting to put on sunscreen in the tropics when I woke up yesterday morning. It wasn't pretty. Thank heavens I woke up in Baguio (yes, we idiotically drove back right after, but that's another story).
Now that I'm back in the urban jungle of Makati with the heat and humidity, all I want to do is sit in a bucket of ice cold water.
It was, all in all, an interesting weekend. All the driving up and down provinces made me realize something - I may whine about being the default driver on road trips, but I give in not because I have to but because I actually want to.
I like being in the drivers seat. That much I now know.
Besides getting better and better at navigating Marcos highway (my friend closes her eyes when she thinks I'm going too fast while negotiating a curve - wahehe), I find the pre-occupation one way of surviving an extremely looonng trip.
When you're driving, you have no time to get bored, you can opt to not join in the small talk from the backseat, and you are free to cuss like a sailor no matter how many elders are in the car with you.
When you are at the wheel, you have a temporary sense of purpose - keep yourself and your passengers safe, out of danger and to get to your destination in one piece. Alive. That in itself is (for me) some twisted sort of reprieve from the mundane responsibilities the world hoists on our shoulders.