Monday 16 December 2013

Road-trips, removals and role reversals


(I wrote this in July but failed to post it and then lost momentum a bit for the blog – but rest assured normal service is now resuming).
 
 
When Matt discovered he was rostered to have 4 days off in a row in early July, we decided to use this time to hire a van, drive north to Brisbane and retrieve the rest of our personal effects we’d had shipped over to Australia, which were still at a storage facility at Seventeen Mile Rocks. 

The journey from Melbourne to Brisbane is approximately 18 hours.  It’s a long way but we looked into doing the trip only one way by road and it was going to cost us a fortune in relocation fees for any vehicle we hired.  We therefore decided to make a road-trip of it.  Matt made noises about us just putting a mattress in the back of the van and a duvet (or doona as they are known here) and stopping overnight in a truck stop to save money.  I contemplated this for a moment and several things vied for attention, chief among which were: 

·         what if I need the loo in the middle of the night?  (I frequently do – in fact just thinking about it makes me want to go!);

·         we’re taking the inland route – overnight temperatures in July can get pretty low (near to zero) in places and we can’t keep the van running all night to stay warm; and

·         How are we going to sleep in the back of the van on the way back when it’s full of our stuff?

At this point I also wished I’d never watched Wolf Creek (a horror film about backpackers on a road-trip being waylaid by a psychotic bushman).  So I vetoed the ‘sleeping in the van’ idea and booked us a motel in Dubbo – the halfway point.  (I still can’t believe there is a place called Dubbo!)

Time was tight and Matt was really busy in the lead up to the long weekend, so I made the bookings (which is usually my job)  but then also out of necessity I had to do several things that were not in my usual position description. 

1.        Pack Matt’s bag for the trip.  I NEVER DO THIS NORMALLY!  It offends my ideas of gender equality.  Inherent in the ‘wife packing her husband’s bags for him’ scenario is the assumption that either a) packing clothes and toiletries in a bag is a domestic chore and all domestic chores are the wife’s domain or b) men are too stupid to think ahead about what they might need for an overnight trip.  I heartily dislike an disagree with both of these assumptions and have therefore flatly refused to perform this task at any point during our 10 year marriage … up till now.  In fairness, Matt has never demanded it and this time, given the logistics involved, I offered, but it was a deeply disturbing experience, all the same.
 

2.       To make up for this, I arranged hire of and picked up the white van we were to transport our belongings in, ensuring that in the process, I reversed one-handed round a corner and blasted the horn at various drivers on the way back to the house until I felt that balance had been restored.  I must add at this stage that most of my horn blasting was to encourage people to take me up on my offer of giving way, when the initial attempt at waving and smiling didn’t work.  In Melbourne, the phenomenon of polite driving is scarce enough quite apart from it emanating from a white van, that I was forced to be rude for their own good.  Honestly! 
 


When Matt got home from work we took off.  We were rather disappointed at how loud the van was given that it was a relatively new model but it drove pretty well and had plenty of poke for overtaking.  I took the first shift, up toward Gouldburn Valley Highway (where the fruit comes from), past Puckapunyal (where Mum and Dad and Denny famously saw the passing out parade http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Urtiyp-G6jY) to Shepparton where we swapped seats and purchased ridiculous quantities of snacks.  I’ve heard of so many of these places and it was kind of cool to drive though/past them even though this route is far from the most picturesque way north (the view in the van excepted of course!) 


When Matt took over the driving again we once again remarked on how noisy but, thankfully, responsive the van was.  We did have to stop rather more frequently for fuel than we had hoped we’d have to, as well.  Again, this prompted wonderment at how such a late model could be so inefficient fuel wise, but hey ho.  We were well on the way now. 
Arriving at Dubbo, we let ourselves into the room we’d booked  – we’d told the proprietors we’d be in late, so they just told us the room number and said the key would be under the mat – then we got ready for bed and crashed out. 

The next day’s drive went smoothly and uneventfully.  Fuelled by the biggest breakfast I have ever seen in my life we continued to take turns driving through glorious sunshine all day. Long stretches of straight road punctuated every hour or so by a right angled turn at some junction or other.  It can get quite mesmerising, which made me a bit paranoid when I was driving.  The guys at the hire place had warned us about kangaroos.  There were also plenty of warning signs all along the way, to which  some individuals with a passion for anatomical accuracy had set about adding genitalia.  However, though we saw plenty of carcasses, nothing jumped out in front of us and we mercifully failed to end our days in a mangled marsupial mess. 


 
 We reached Toowoomba around teatime and because of the road-works taking place on the steep and winding road off the range, the last hour of the journey felt interminable.  We were well and truly ready to get out of the van by the time we drove up Pam’s driveway. 

Pam had several guests who had all come round for a barbecue to watch the British and Irish Lions play the Wallabies in Brisbane.  As the evening proceeded and the match got further away from the home team, the mood became distinctly subdued and disgruntled.  I was the only non-Aussie there and once again an incidental guest in Pam’s house.  I  therefore decided to keep quiet about the sporting disaster unfolding.  I’m not massively into team sport spectating but one of the things I was looking forward to in coming to Australia was being able to support sportsmen and women who had half a chance of actually winning something for a change. But between the pitiful performance in the Ashes tour in England and the Lions tour here, I was experiencing some surprise at the role reversal between this Great Sporting Nation and that of various teams originating from the British Isles.  It felt very odd.  What the hell was going on?  Maybe it was me!?  I never could watch Chris Paterson take a kick without him fluffing it.  Maybe the same jinx was now applying to Australian sportsmen?  (Note from December 2013:  Of course the Aussies have more than made up for these past humiliations in the Australian 2013 Ashes test, it would seem.  I’m most relieved that it wasn’t me after all.)
The next day we managed to catch up with a bunch of friends in between getting our stuff from the storage facility – in which more role reversals made themselves apparent.  Matt spent the whole time blethering to the bloke that ran the place – lovely people – while I gave directions to the fork lift guy and loaded the van. 

We were just leaving the storage place when Matt, in attempting to hand me his phone to answer and pull away into traffic at the same time (Matt?  Multi-tasking and keeping us back blethering all over the place?!)  jogged the gear stick by mistake causing it to slide alarmingly to the right … at which point we realised that we’d just driven 18 hours to Brisbane in third gear.  Neither of us are familiar with driving automatic transmission vehicles.  The 3 and the D were on the same level and in putting the van in gear, neither of us had realised that to get it into ‘Drive’ we needed to slide the stick sideways. 

On the way back down the road the van was much quieter and more fuel efficient… we noted humbly and bashfully.
We stopped off early the next day at Parkes Observatory – famous from the film ‘The Dish’ – fascinating stuff.  Our favourite bit was the two satellite dishes they have in the gardens.  These dishes face each other with a distance of around 150 metres between them.  You can stand in front of one and hear the person standing in front of the opposite dish whisper as though they were standing right next to you.  It’s a gimmick designed to demonstrate the efficiency of the dish shape in picking up signals over large distances, but we were enthralled.  It’s possible that the long, boring drive had made such highlights even higher in our estimation, but whatever. 
 



The final leg of the journey all role reversals were set to rights once again when I haired off down the wrong road and only started worrying after about an hour of seeing signs to Sydney instead of Melbourne.  We did a mad dash through countryside populated by very few people, ever tinier roads and ABSOLUTELY NO FUEL STATIONS to get back to the right route.  Again I wished I had never watched Wolf Creek, especially when we went through a wee village called Lockhart that looked strangely surreal … like a film set and STILL didn’t have a fuel station. 

In the end we got home about the same time we had planned but it certainly made for an exciting trip.  While on the whole, we’d enjoyed the trip  - including the snack pit as we named it – we agreed that next time we went to Brisbane, we’d be going by plane. 


 


 

 

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