Over the hills and far away

As the flood waters recede in SE Qld and northern NSW and the costs are counted, stories of heroic service above and beyond the call of duty have begun to filter into the daylight. Mostly from the oresome peeps of the State Emergency Service, of course, but occasionally from yer Average Joe type. Take our man AJ, who found himself on the Gold Coast (sounds Biblical, wasn't) last weekend, less than two hours from home and maybe three from work in Grafton, before all the rivers ran and the Pacific Highway was cut in more places than Edward Scissorhands' wanksock. There was no prospect of getting home... but there was a chance of getting back to Grafton. If he did this.

6am departure. Broadbeach, to Nerang, to Beaudesert, to Woodenbong, down the Clarence Way on GPS instruction, backpedalling cos it's a fucking goat track, back to Urbenville (very ironically named as it's neither) and cutting through the mountains to rejoin the equally laughably named Mount Lindesay Highway - the only national highway on the eastern seaboard which is still dirt - to finally reunite with decent blacktop at Stanthorpe. Then on to Tenterfield, across the top of the New England Tablelands to Glen Innes, then the final plunge down the Gibraltar Range to Grafton, just a mere 160 kays to finish. Google Maps records the total distance as 620km and the projected elapsed time as eight hours, 41 minutes. They are fucking kidding themselves. Sydney to Maclean is about that time and distance and it's mostly open freeway. This shit would have been a 9-10 hour wet tarmac rally stage - apart from the bits which were gravel, and they might both be Frauds but a lumping great AU Falcon wagon ain't a Focus WRC.

And all that just to get to work on Monday.

You might call him brave, you might call him stupid. I call him something else. I call him a lucky, lucky bastard. For there are very few things on this glorious green Earth that I love more - on that list with bacon, beer, bikes, bi-curious amateur girlies et al - than the wonder that is the Great Strayan Road Trip. Intended or otherwise. The intoxication of distance, the excuse to eat inappropriate amounts of crap food, and the psychosis that the road instigates, where every in-joke becomes schoolgirl-giggly-hilarious. Our trip down to Sydney for Homebake was a good example - the truck we passed with the bumper sticker 'If you can't stop, at least smile as you go under' was adopted as a cover-all philosophy for the remainder of the trip. Certainly summed up the quality of banter being engaged in within the cockpit.

The road trip bug hit me early, as soon as I was able to conduct my own examples thereof. The Brown Hornet you've already met. It had a dodgy fuel gauge, looked like a squared-off turd and the back had a tendency to go around corners faster than the front. But it demolished road trips. The run from the lower Clarence to the Clovelly Hotel (or anywhere else in the eastern suburbs of Sin City) it absolutely dined out on; 2200 rpm in top, just inside the safe 10% over the posted limit; stereo cranked, scything the air apart, low slung, hunkered down, obliterating distance. Eight hours forty was the Hornet's record for the 650 kays, many years ago when the Pacific Highway was notably more shit. To put it mildly, this compared favourably with the twelve-plus hours it took on an overnight coach seated next to unwashed Byron ferals which had been de rigueur for uni holiday sorties prior to the Hornet's commissioning. And that's kind of the point. When the other options at hand are Countrylink and Premier Motor Service, 153 bhp of six-cylinder-powered squared-off-turd very quickly attains legendary status. Even the very wet trip where the drivers' side wiper blade broke off the wiper arm while going flat-stick and spat itself into a hedge nearing Hexham, only 500 very sodden km from home, would have been preferable to folding oneself into the arsebiting confines of a Scania double-decker coach for half a day, not to mention the 3am stops in places like the Mobil roadhouse in Karuah or even, joy of joys, the desperately fucking dodgy Ayers Rock Roadhouse in the shattered dystopian remnants of Leyland Brothers World. A truly depressing place in the darkest witching hours of the soul.

(So how do you drive 500km in the wet with no wipers? Rain-X and youthful stupidity carried the day; I had drinking to do up home the next day, dammit. A few days later a replacement arm was secured from a junked Pintara at nearby Brushgrove Wreckers, which was ironically where the Hornet itself met its final resting place some years later. There is a fair-to-reasonable chance that over the past week the remains of the Hornet have found themselves subjugated, and probably momentarily submerged, under the lower Clarence's short-lived expansion campaign.)

As backpackers from all over the world have discovered, Australia is designed for road trips. Visit-worthy sights are usually separated by a few hours drive at max, meaning the half-day-driving, three-days-pissing-up model of seeing the country (particularly the eastern seaboard) is National Best Practice. Brisbane to Port Douglas is a great trip for a bunch of mates in a car or van, hopping between the holiday spots - Noosa, Fraser Island, Airlie Beach, Cairns - spending a couple of days in each, sinking beers and chasing backpacker chicks. It's a trip I've wanted to do for years, ever since the Captain came back from a band trip to FNQ with tales aplenty - in fact we came close to assembling a Raiding Party to do it at the end of '99 but time, money and Yuri and the plot diverging momentarily led to the mission being canned.

However, even without the mates, the backpacker chicks or the nightly sinking of piss, road trips are still compelling, even as a solo endurance exercise - man and machine against distance, time and conditions. The Captain used to get that. He'd find himself unable to sleep and set off on ridiculous high-speed early-hours loops through the North Coast hinterland, hammering down unfamiliar roads in the darkness in whatever dodgy shitbox he was pedalling at the time just to see if and where they connected up (all roads in the North Coast hinterland eventually connect up somewhere.) I get that. Some days, you roll out of bed and you just want to drive, somewhere, anywhere. Even now, I still get that. Queenstown, Wanaka, Christchurch, even Gore.


And Gore's a fucking shithole.

The Doctor is OUT.