Canoe was made out of marzipan
My navigator tells me to take a left, so I start turning and realise it’s a one way street, coming the other way, and that was the last straw. I swerve out of the way and pull over on the side of the road. I’m like, this is it, cant go on much longer…must sleep! I’ve been driving since 7 am, and its now approaching 2 am. Im shaking, I cant see properly, things aren’t making any sense and I cant take driving round in circles any more.
Emma’s trying to convince me that it cant be much further, this is borne out by a passer by who says its only 10 minutes walk away, but to get there by car you’d have to go back through the town again, and I just cant face it. I’ll end up in an accident. The idea of walking isn’t, shockingly, taking lisa by storm, even with some company. I suggest a taxi, and I say I’ll pay for it, I just want to get out of here.
We seem to be in one of those dead spots for taxis, the area where all the cabs are taken by the time they drive past you. Its one of those nights where you are the twat screaming “Taxi!” followed by “Bollox!” every five seconds as they drive on by. It takes a half hour to flag one down.
Lisa goes. Its worth the 10 bucks!
Back in the van. Bearing in mind my navigator hasn’t got her glasses and I can barely keep my eyes open. So I try and stay on the road, Clare looks out for signs and Emma tries to read the map. It’s a team effort and we make it to Bondi Junction without any deaths or other major hassles. We then get lost trying to find Darren’s place, I cant remember exactly where he lives and the road signs don’t help. End up calling him and his girlfriend has to come out and find us….We were about 50 yards away.
Jesus, we’re there! A hahhahaha! 5 days and 3000 something K’s and its over.
Hot showers. Clean towels. Cold beer. Vodka and coke.
We were, of course, quite quickly, very, very drunk.
Kerb Crawling
Suddenly, we’re on a 3 lane motorway with traffic everywhere, quite a shock to the system. Other cars? I’d forgotten what they were. And now they are everywhere! AAArgh! Get the fuck away from me!
Also couldn’t see anything out of the passenger side mirror, because it wouldn’t stay in the same place for more than 2 minutes. This hadn’t been a problem for the last few days, as I hadn’t even looked at it, but I now needed it.
So I’m desperately trying to hold it together, just want to get this over with. But, of course, we have to drive into the middle of the city, Kings Cross, on a Friday night to drop Lisa off at wherever she is going to stay.
About an hour later, I’ve nearly run entire swathes of pissed people over, been round and round central Sydney 3 or 4 times and we still cant find the bloody place. We’ve even asked a prostitute for directions. She didn’t charge us, which was nice.
What mountains?
I hadn’t really loked at the route, as the only directions we’d had for the past 2 days were basically “Go straight on, when you get wet, you’re in Sydney harbour” , and had assumed that the road would be flat from here on in, but this turned out to be complete bollox. We had to go through the snowy mountains (at least I think that’s what they are called. Wasn’t any snow, but they were definitely mountains.).
All of a sudden, as we were climbing, it actually started snowing. And things were hitting the van and pinging of it. This was quite hard snow I thought, until we realised that the snow was in fact insects. Millions of the bastards.
The windscreen became very difficult to see through due to sheer weight of road kill on the glass, and the road became really nasty, with hairpins every kilometre or so. Had to drop to second gear quite often on the climbs as Bobby (the van) couldn’t cope with any higher gear ratio.
At this point, I was beginning to zone out, what with the tunnel vision effect of the insects, fatigue, the lights being crap on the van and the insect encrusted windscreen and I guess I should have stopped driving really, but there wasn’t anywhere to stop, and frankly I was worried that if we did, we’d end up rolling backwards down the mountains such was the steepness of the roads and the unwillingness of Bobby to climb the buggers.
Well, the next couple of hours was spent taking it really easy, and trying not to fall off the road. The descent was almost as bad as the climb, and I was so happy to get onto a flat piece of road. Its now about 1 am. We can taste Sydney. Ahhh!
Getting the Sheets
Of course, we set off and about 10 k’s later I remembered that I had forgotten to remember to fill up with water. I immediately checked the engine temp gauge, which was by now trying to go through the roof.
So I pulled over cursing, and then we had to wait for the engine to cool, all the time the time and light dwindling. About half hour later I couldn’t be arsed to wait anymore, and the gauge showed about 60 degrees, so I got my bed sheet out, and put on some gloves, put my shades on and crumpled up the bed sheet over the radiator cap and nervously tried top take the cap off. Luckily, the bed sheet saved me from turning into the English patient as the steam inside the radiator boiled up and out as the pressure was released.
So, put on some new pants and filled the water system up, and off we went. Had about an hour or so’s light left, with 200 k’s to do, so I was caining it.
Friday morning - not running on all cylinders
So, the morning came around, and the girls packed things up whilst I attended to the van. Got to the engine and immediately noticed the solution to the fuel problems we were having, the fact that one of the ht leads was hanging off so we had only been running on 3 cylinders for the past god knows how many K’s. This was an easy fix! Strangley the van hadn’t been running like a dog, but looking back it had been a bit more sluggish, but I had put this down to headwinds….rationalising things again so that all was well. This is a problem of mine….
I then topped up the water (after wrestling with the radiator cap for 5 minutes, the swine wouldn’t come off) and then tried to find this bloody leak. Couldn’t find it after half hour of searching, so figured it was the radiator cap not on properly or buggered as it wasn’t coming off easy or going on for that matter and figured that the water was coming out as steam when the engine was running hot. This seemed to make sense and therefore there was nothing to be done about it but to watch the temperature.
As we were leaving the campsite, the girls next to us were up, and one of them was performing some kata with two nasty looking wooden staffs, like a pair of nunchucks without the chain. What the hell was she so worried about last night??
Anyway, god knows what they must have thought about us, bunch of weirdos turn up, have massive shouting match and then leave.
So off we go to the garage, which thank god is open and devoid off petrol headz.
Met a guy in who had hit a roo in a car the night before, he had no roo bar, and the whole front right of his car was all smashed up…was lucky it didn’t come through the windscreen.
So, we filled up and headed off.
Fruit
We stopped in Orange for dinner at about 6pm, we had a maccy d’s. It was much needed as hadn’t really eaten all day. We stayed for an hour, and we only had about 200 k’s to do, so it all seemed set to make it to Sydney before nightfall at 9ish and the ever present leaping roo and wombat threat. Id been reminding myself to check the water before we set off, as the engine would have cooled in the time we were eating and taking the radiator cap off wouldn’t then have involved having my face burnt off by steam from the engine, which is always a plus.
Friday….Driving…..Betty Swollocks
I drove a lot that Friday. We stopped a few times, mainly to unstick various parts of our anatomy from other parts, to pull underwear out of your crack, and to prise testicles apart. But mainly I just drove. Was great to see the scenery change from desert to green, as we approached civilisation and a town called Orange, which is aptly named as they are the apple growing capital of Australia. Go figure.
The landscape could have been from back home, looked like Wales or Wiltshire. Beautiful.
The atmosphere in the van wasn’t too bad, everyone was being overly polite to each other, which was a bit false but it was better than silence and or blaring arguments.
Lisa gets it
well. So we all went to bed after the little disagreement. Clare and I have been talking to each other about lisa every now and again over the past few weeks, its like a relief valve on a pressure cooker, we need to have these little slagging sessions so that neither of us go mad and explode. We had both told each other that we would not blow up at her, if we had too, until the road trip was over as this would be bad with all of us in close proximity in the van for the rest of the trip.
Anyway, so we’re in the tent, slagging off lisa, for about half an hour, when lisa’s voice drifts over from the van….
“I can hear you guys”….”they’re talking about me”
im like “really?” which was a bit weak
she says “yeah. You got issues with me?”
so im replying “Yup, I have lots of issues, but I really don’t want to do this right now.”
“well I want to talk about it now”
so I says to clare, “If I do this now, I will go spastic. I wont be able to help it”
and clare says “well, maybe you should”
so , I shout out “ok then , come on , lets get this over with”
And I put my shoes on and get out of the tent. I suggest that we go away from the 2 vans as we don’t want to disturb everybody even further. So we march off into the murk of the night.
So she starts, “whats the problem”
I cant remember exactly what I said, but I started off quite quietly, but quickly turned into shouting , with
“well, its you not pitching in and being totally self absorbed and selfish and not helping anyone ever, we’re supposed to be a team, you don’t reply when someone asks the group a question that might effect us all, you have to be asked separately, you never have any input, you ponce ciggies and beers off people all the time, not just me, but everyone, and never offering anything back and specifically you feeling that its such a chore to pass me or clare anything from the back of the van up front, like, water, which we need in order not to collapse, the fact that all you have to do is keep refilling the bottles and making sure that we all have cold water to drink and you cant even manage that, you watching me and the other 2 unloading stuff after a long days drive and you standing there smoking, or you complaining about mosquito bites all the time, or its too hot, or telling really, really boring stories that are my cats blacker than your cat type efforts just so you can have the last word in a conversation and try and make yourself look good or the fact that you have to ask questions like where should I hang this tea towel which just drives people crazy, you’re 35 for fucks sake, grow up! And if you think you are going to behave this way in Sydney then you can just forget it, im not gonna throw you on the street but you gonna need to sort out somewhere else to stay pretty bloody quickly if that’s the case….”
And it went on.
And it felt so good!
God did it feel great!
I eventually ran out of steam, and she came back with “well, that’s just your opinion”
To which I just had to say “well, actually, its not just mine, there are at least 4 others I know of that have the same thoughts”
“who are they? Tell me!”
“well, I’ll let you figure that out lisa” which was a bit childish of me but i couldn’t resist, and it also had the benefit of being true.
Anyways, she then said that she had sorted out other accommodation in Sydney, to which I replied “thank fuck for that , and im off to bed goodnight.”
She then spent the next half hour talking to clare and emma, saying that “its just me, im not being selfish” to which I heard clare reply “well, actually lisa, you are selfish” and she then proceeded to reel off a list. Emma just let it go on, didn’t seem to disagree.
Clare comes back to the tent, and well, we both agreed that we felt much better.
I decided that we were all going to get up early the next morning so that I would have time to try and fix the van and still have time to get to Sydney in one day and not prolong the torture anymore.
We then realised we had left all the bags out of the van and decided that we should put them in the back of the van, given the kind of characters that were about. We communicated this to the two inside the van, and emma asked lisa if she could put the mosquito net back over the back of the van (they slept with the back door open (as it were…))when we had finished. So there’s lisa standing there watching us move everyones gear into the back of the van, including hers, holding the mosquito net. The thought of helping didn’t even cross her mind, which by now, we were used to. Her reason for this was that Emma had only told her to put the mosquito net. I think she believes that she is under Emma’s power and will only do her bidding exactly as instructed.
It’s a shame im no good at ventriloquism, cos that could have been a lot of fun.
“Lisa, poke yourself in the eye”
"lisa, say something interesting"
"Lisa, dont talk in that stupid brummy accent"
“Lisa, get the fuck away from me and shuttup”
Etc.
