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2000 Miles on the Smell of an Oily Family
CITY LIFE was gettin' us down, so we spent a week in Darwin town, liked the crocs and liked the beer, so decided to move the family here. Some decisions in life are really hard to make, but, once made, are reasonably easy to implement. This decision, however, was made in the euphoric fog of holiday happiness, and then took two years to arrange. Readers who may have seen my description of my biodiesel production a few issues back may remember that I am a scavenger and junk collector, and had been living in the same house for about 14 years. In hindsight it was probably inevitable that we would have to move sooner or later, once the junk and rubbish accumulating in the house reached critical mass and shoved us out the door. I figured that owning a Hilux 4WD (albeit vegie oil-powered) qualified me for life in the Top End, and so we decided that we would drive to Darwin, fully loaded with the kids, camping gear and those absolutely essential treasures that (a) I couldn't part with, and (b) I was sure would come in extremely handy once there. (Some readers may be interested to know that a kitchen sink was included!) Rather than shooting straight up the middle, we decided to do a slow drive up the east coast and across the top from Cairns. Winter in Melbourne was approaching so it seemed like the perfect time for a long, meandering camping trip, visiting friends and family, and exploring the increasingly warm New South Wales and Queensland coast. It was May 2009. One of the advantages of a long lead time to departure was that it gave me the chance to build up my stocks of biodiesel, as I was determined to get as far as possible on my own fuel. We were dragging a trailer along - a homemade camper trailer that I had constructed out of secondhand materials - that would inevitably increase fuel consumption, but it also allowed me to stack on board a lot more fuel. In the end, with the long-range fuel tank and a stack of disposable 10-litre plastic containers (old detergent containers scavenged from a restaurant), we hit the road with 380 litres of homemade biodiesel. Gradually family life returned to normal as we drove north and stuff slowly flowed backwards out of the cab. However, near Canberra we stopped at my parent's farm for a few days where I had cleverly roped my Dad into making some biodiesel over the Christmas holiday, so I was able to refuel to the tune of about 65 litres, much to everyone else's chagrin! Back in isolation we headed north to Sydney, where, armed with my 1985 Gregory's Road Map, we got completely lost within minutes of arriving. Trying to do 16-point turns in Newtown with a trailer, visibility confined to the external mirrors, ratty kids and a stressed and annoyed navigator is probably not one of the trip's highlights. Fortunately, a Dick Smith shop appeared like a beacon on the horizon, and, $260 later, we were armed with the ultimate relationship saver (counsellor, romance aid and companion, all rolled into one!) - the Tom Tom GPS. In her best BBC voice, Serena calmly guided us through the Sydney chaos to our destination, unfl appable even when I (still) went the wrong way ("Turn around where possible"). After a while, Serena's smug confidence started to annoy us, so we opted for Ken, the New Zealander, because at least we could make fun of his eccent.
In the morning we headed back to the highway at Kempsey, undecided whether to continue north, or backtrack and head inland. The RTA's recorded message was advising motorists to avoid the Pacific Highway and use the New England Highway instead. The words of a man I chatted with as I packed the car at the motel were ringing in my ears: "You'd be mad to go north. All the major rivers have fl ood warnings. Half the towns between here and the border are about to evacuate. You'll get stuck for sure, mate". We pulled over in Kempsey's main street in a stew of indecision. It seemed a choice between backtracking, heading inland to no rain, but freezing nights, or sticking to the coast in torrential rain, but warm. We were Victorians; we hadn't seen rain for years ("Daddy, what's that stuff on the windscreen?"), and this whole venture was about getting away from the cold. We drove on. |
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In the first part of the Tyndale-Briscoe family odyssey to warmer climes, the group reaches storm-tossed northern New South Wales accompanied by many litres of biodiesel and a direction-finding Kiwi named Ken.
If my wife objected to having to sit in the yoga position for the first 1000 km until we could burn up a bit of fuel and make some space in the trailer for the EG gear at her feet, she stoically kept it to herself. One advantage of the arrangement, however, was that we couldn't hear the kids fighting in the back, because we couldn't see them (in fact they couldn't see each other either, so maybe they weren't fighting).
The family chariot at a pit stop.