3. Where did you go on vacations as a child?

This is less about a vacation and more about the travel itself.  In the 1968-1971 period, we were living in the small town of Allahabad in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where our father was an Indian Air Force officer posted to the Air Force Base at Bamrauli.  

Here is a picture inside our house, with parents, brother Harish and sister Aruna.

At that time we owned this Ambassador car (pix is father, Aruna and a neighbor):

In those days, inter-city travel by car was very rare: the highway infrastructure was very rough and roadside facilities were extremely poor.  In spite of this, our father boldly took us on several long distance trips.  This story is about one of them: we drove from Allahabad to Chennai and back.  Our family of six, plus father's younger brother (the only other driver) did the trip over many weeks.  We packed all our luggage on a roof carrier.  Harish and I became experts at loading and unloading the luggage, especially roadside when we had to change a flat tire.

In those days, the Automobile Association of India was the sole source of information.  We planned the route with their help, and got a whole sheaf of single page maps for each tiny section of the trip.  We planned each night-stop at some "Government Rest House", also called a "Dak Bungalow".  Most of these were relics of the British, built along roads for the British to stay during their travels, and for the mail-carrying vehicles ("Dak" is Hindi for mail, "Bungalow" is anglicized form of Hindi "Bungla" meaning a house).  In most of these remote places, even phones were non-existent, therefore all booking was done in advance, by regular mail!  We were eligible to use these facilities as an employee of the Government (Air Force). 

The entire trip was full of interesting happenings, including flat tires, which required roadside unload of luggage, swapping of spare tire, and a detour to the nearest village for repair of spare before continuing.  But the most interesting incident occurred in this stretch, in the state of Madhya Pradesh, between the towns of Japalpur and Nagpur:

This area is hilly and forested; and at that time was notorious for "dacoits".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacoity

Here's a Time article from that time:

https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,877695-1,00.html

As we approached this stretch, we were stopped by a small Police outpost, something like this:

They warned us that it was not safe to drive on, because armed gangs of dacoits were known to be in the area, and that they would stop cars and rob the occupants.  They made us wait until about a dozen vehicles were stopped, then told us to proceed as a convoy, with a policeman in the lead car (ours) and in the rearmost car.  Each policeman carried a rifle; a very antique looking weapon, with doubtful capability to actually fire!

We proceeded cautiously as a convoy through the hills, wondering every second if a  gang was hiding in the forests on either side.  The policeman in our car seemed more frightened than any of us!

We made it across without incident, except for an open jeep with suspicious characters driving by and checking the convoy.  At the other end of the hilly stretch, we dropped off the policemen at another outpost and carried on towards Nagpur. 

Today this highway is a well-maintained national highway, with multiple lanes and guard barriers on each side; not so in those days!  It's still amazing that we took such trips, in many cases with our father as the sole driver.  We also did a memorable trip from Allahabad to Shimla, at the foothills of the Himalaya mountain range; will save that story for another time.