Not a good time to take up smoking

I’ve been chasing the vanishing point for 3 days now and have finally landed within sight of Melbourne. 570km today and I am spending the night in Seymour, Victoria, which is only 115km from the ferry port. I get to have a bit of a sleep in tomorrow and then a casual drive into the city.

But I almost didn’t make it.

I woke up, packed my car, scraped the ice off the windows (!!!) and headed out onto the road. I had only just hit the 80km zone and started to accelerate when I noticed an awful lot of smoke coming from the exhaust. Then I noticed an awful lot of smoke coming from under the bonnet. I took this as a sign to stop.

I am more than happy to acknowledge that I am not a car person or particularly mechanically capable but I knew enough to open the bonnet and have a look. Even to me it was obvious what had happened. The filler cap for the auto transmission fluid had come loose and oil had spilled onto the engine itself. It was this that had been smoking. I wiped it off with a cloth but could not get the dipstick to reseat properly and it was still loose.

At this point a man in an old van stopped on the other side of the road, leaned out of his window and asked me if I needed a hand. I joked that I didn’t really know what I was looking at and then next thing I knew he was standing beside me and confirming what I had already decided. The only problem was he had no idea how to lock in the dipstick either. Standing there looking into the engine we chatted and when he found out I was from the Gold Coast he said that he had worked at Jupiter’s Casino for 15 years. From then on we had something in common as we both agreed that they were the worlds worst company to work for.

But that wasn’t fixing my car and I was starting to imagine a long stay in Forbes. I asked if my new friend could suggest a garage I could take it to and he ended up driving ahead of me and showing me the way to Wayne Jones Repairs and then introducing me to the mechanic. How’s that for just helping someone stopped on the side of the road. It’s the sort of thing that would only happen in a small town.

The embarrassing thing was that the mechanic came out and just flipped up the little lever on the dipstick and it locked into place. Turned out we had been doing it the wrong (but I still say the logical) way. A couple of seconds and it was all fixed. The excess oil had burned off by this time and the car has performed faultlessly since. At least it was an experience and managed to reaffirm some of my faith in human nature.

For the rest of the trip it was pretty much more of the same. I am thinking that a book could be written simply about a trip down the Newell Highway though. I passed all sorts of little museums and historical sites as well as things like Australia’s smallest sheep station and the Big Strawberry. I also saw a couple of emus feeding casually on the side of the road which made a change from all the kangaroos which have not really been standing.

I am beginning to have a new respect for the amount of material that is being moved around this country by truck and an even bigger respect for the extent of caravan ownership.

On to Tasmania tomorrow. Actually that’s not entirely true…onto the ferry tomorrow and Tasmania the next day.