let off steam

"I would say that this is an attempt to give young people a valve to let off steam - so that they can at least have the illusion of a quick trip abroad," he says.

In between the stops and restarts, they both wittily let off steam about the absurdity of the process.

She realized she needed to let off steam in a way she rarely does.

There were corrugated aluminum chutes down the mountainside to channel water, and I joked that they were water slides for predators to let off steam between kills.

A tightly constrained opposition and occasional street protests were long seen as an important pressure valve for the Kremlin, through which its frustrated subjects could let off steam.