May 16th, 2023Kyle’s Rant!

DONNA and I have decided to hit the road for a bit of time away over
winter. We did the same journey a while back but this time it has to
be planned within an inch of its life.
The problem is that we will be away for one production of The Local and we will
be outback in the north-west, which has been devastated by floods that no one much
over here has heard about – but they covered the same land mass as the UK.
The hardest thing about the journey is that places like Fitzroy Crossing are trying
to get on their feet, swamped by tradies fixing the buildings and roads up and there is
not much in the way of accommodation or communication.
We were going by way of a caravan, however most of those for sale claim to
have done the big trip once and I don’t want to make that mistake, so it is a frumpy
motel trip for us. I have secured accommodation in all the places that are hard to get
and have invested in Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet. Meaning that particular
edition of The Local will be beamed up to the cosmos and back down to our printers
(what a ride).
Around 20 years ago, which seems like only a couple of years to me, we embarked
on the same journey which ended up getting cut short by a family emergency. I was
working selling luxury motorboats under the Westgate Bridge at Pier 35 Marina.
I mention where I was working because I can draw a parallel to the type of car
I was driving which was a gold Hyundai Sonata. Most of my clients were mega rich
and had gloriously lavish cars, boats, houses and toys. When I saw this thing twirling
around on a display in the car showroom, I had to have it for its ostentatious colour
and the fact the body design was extremely close to the Jaguar of the day. And then
there was the price, a modest 25K, more of a me price.

Although I have some idea of an engine room in a boat and a little less but
passable knowledge of what is under the bonnet, I never looked at my Hyundai’s
power plant. It blasted along the freeway, had Bluetooth and a good CD player. It was
only when I took off on a slippery road up a hill, I realised it had front wheel drive.
Anyway, one winter’s day Donna and I decided to hit the road and took six
weeks off work to drive up the guts through Alice Springs, turn left at Katherine, pull
into Darwin and then follow the road until we got back. We had no plans and no
particular timetable. Our accommodation was a tent and we booked into powered
sites so we could run the heaters, fans, TV, phone chargers and electric blankets. I kid
you not. Gotta have some home comforts.
Now around sunset at most of these caravan parks a stir begins to happen as
the women attend to the meals and the older blokes start to roam. At first it’s just
a couple and the group grows as they walk around, stubby in hand. These guys are
harmless enough, they just enjoy talking about what septic system you have onboard
your RV and how many miles to the gallon you do, that sort of thing.
One evening while partaking in a hashish farewell gift for the trip, this throng of
blokes came over the hill into my powered tent site, looked around at our abundance
of appliances and then drew their gaze to my shiny new Hyundai.
They started asking what I had under the hood…questions like the economy
of the vehicle and even what sort of tyres I had chosen for the journey. Drawing a
complete blank from me they tutted and almost as one mumbled about safety and
young drug addicts.
There won’t be any intentional ingesting of illegal substances on this trip, even
vaping, and it should be just a very relaxing, pleasant and long, long drive.
Long drive rant over…