Thursday 21 April 2016

R is for ROADTRIP


The cross country attack so 2 folk who live at the beach can see more beach, starts today. Must be cos we really love the beach huh? It ain't cos we love to drive that's for sure, in fact I do wonder what the hell we are doing.

We are driving the 'long way' from Adelaide to Melbourne - about 750 kms but it might be longer cos I want to see the southern most Sorrento and compare it to our little bit of lovely. We both know that 750kms is not far and certainly not when you look on the map, shit it's only a couple of inches across the bottom bit, but it's far for us because, firstly, I only drive in MY car and had I been able to teleport it down here I would have been OK with driving, but we have hired this walloper. Stevie asked for a Mitsi but instead they 'upgraded' us to some big old black toyota which maybe was a funeral car in a previous life. It's fucking huge and I will never be able to park it up and I have no interest in reading the 'how to' manual to get to know it, and the handbrake is on the floor next to your feet. How are you meant to climb in under there to do a hill start? Really, why is the fucking HAND brake next to your FOOT? So I might drive if we pull over on the side of the road to do the baton exchanges, and I never have to even come close to having to put in in between other cars or even run the risk of deflating the tyres by pulling up alongside of the concrete curb.

Stevie just doesn't like to drive long distances. He finds it boring and tedious and if there are dickheads on the road, frustrating and irritating. This is not just an Aussie thing where everything is so bloody far apart, he wasn't all that fond of driving in England either. Shit see now I am thinking of one road trip there from London to York where the bloody car blew up and we sat for 3 hours in the middle of a traffic island breathing in exhaust and then I had a migraine for the time away. Yeh that was pretty shit.

My lovely dad used to throw us all in the car and take off. I remember that this happened particularly at Easter. We'd all roll around in the back of his monster car and head to Sydney. It was great fun, except that my sister was always car sick so there was a stink of vomit cos Dad never wanted to stop until it was too late, and if you wanted to pee, you just had to hang on. One year he thought he'd take his mate in Sydney a crate of apples but when we got the the border, the inspectors said that we couldn't take 'em into NSW cos fruit flies recognised the arbitrary line and never flew south by mistake, so we sat on the side of the road and ate 'em all up. That's a lot of apples between 5 people! And you can just imagine how much we needed the loo for the next 900km.

So even though 'drivers' could do the distance in a day, we are taking 5 days to get there.

I hope there is stuff to see, but I imagine that in true Aussie style, there will be long long stretches of bugger all spotted with, 'Wow did you see that!'

Do you like driving?
How far is far enough in a day?



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