Thursday, 27 April 2006

Driven

Robyn’s folks and Lara came over for her cousins wedding last Monday. It was held at a place called Mt Buffalo, which is a ski resort five hours out of Melbourne. As we’ve just a wee car (a little three door Daihatsu) we decided to hire a large Mitzy Magna wagon so that we all arrived at the wedding without having to origami ourselves into the car.

The drive was deadly and I was lucky that Graeme was there to share the mind numbing drive. The problem with Australia is that it all looks the same. I think the gum trees are lovely but the land is so flat that there’s nothing to break it up. This lack of geographic variation means that there’s no reason for the road not to go straight and so result is a country where you can make three right turns in eight hours and get from Melbourne to Canberra.

The saving grace of all this was that I discovered cruise control. Sadly lacking from the Volvo Land-Brick that I used to own, the automated speed made it feel like I was behind the wheel of the Knight 2000. The only down side is that it was all a bit MarioCart MarioKart, in that I only had to steer and not bother about the speed. Luckily we made it there and back without incident but who knows what would have happened if I had spotted a turtle shell in the middle of the road.

We also had a great time at the wedding.

No comments: