Déjà fucking vu

It’s not ideal to start your day with a puncture. In fact it sucks. I broke the news to Becky by doing that thing when you shout “good news”, and for a second she thought I actually had good news. But I didn’t have good news. That was the joke… the unfunny joke.

As we weren’t blocking any roads this time, I decided to change the tyre myself. We still had the same shitty jack, but I thought I could make it work. The whole time Becky wanted to ask the other campers if we could borrow their stuff. But I said, “NO, I got this”. And I did, and it wasn’t that hard… I got the necessary experience to do this shit now. Some old fella did ask if we needed help, but I declined. It all went very smoothly. However, I did lose my temper packing up the tent, that stupid, fucking piece of shit tent.

With the tyre successfully changed, we started off on our journey south. We weren’t feeling particularly jovial, and the whole experience was beginning to wear us down. At this point you normally add how these things are character building, but I like to think I have enough character, and car troubles aren’t going to do shit to make me a better person. We’d originally planned to drive through the Flinders Ranges and stay a few nights there. As the exhaust was broken, again, and we had no spare tyre, again, we thought we’d head to Adelaide to get that shit fixed ASAP, and just do a quick drive through Finders without camping or hiking. For those who have kept up with our journey, this should be ringing bells. We were heading south into shitty, colder weather, to a state capitol, to fix a puncture and a broken exhaust just as the weekend was starting so everything was shut… At least this time we had the engine light on to show we were progressing.

The drive through Flinders was amazing. The scenery was beautiful and we saw loads of emu’s, kangaroos, wedge-tailed eagles, a snake, and loads of other reptiles. Did we appreciate the experience? Nope, we just whinged about how unlucky we are and how difficult our life driving around Australia on an extended holiday is.

Very much in need of a tea spoon of cement

Becky did a better job of covering her displeasure at our predicament for the pictures. But we both felt at the end of our tether, honest!

Just grin and bear it

After spending a couple of hours speeding through an area of natural beauty that you could easily spend a week in, we opted to spend the night in Snowtown. Nothing brings home the trivial nature of your problems than spending the night in a town infamous for being the place numerous murdered bodies were stored by a serial killer and his gang.

I think the sign makes it clear, there are no killers here

We arrived at the town quite late, and pulled into the camping spot run by the locals… It turned out to be nothing more than the car park of the local community centre. I was not impressed, and for the second time that day I lost my usual calm composure.

What camping is all about

As we sat in the car, the campground caretaker pulled up next to us and asked if we were staying. I didn’t have any more driving in me, so I reluctantly paid for a site. He mentioned that they were also serving food at the clubhouse that night, and we were welcome to eat there. We put the tent up, and as neither of us could face pasta stir-in or 3-mintue noodles, we wandered over to the clubhouse. What a fucking gem of a place! It was AWESOME, filled with locals eating the cheap, but surprisingly nice food. We had a lovely bit of grilled butterfish and chips for $10 each, washed down with cheap golds. Oh, how wrong I was about this place. We spent the rest of the evening watching the locals and feeling everything was right with the world.

Blending in

That night we slept well, except for the train that ran right passed the camp spot… I guess nothing’s perfect. As we packed up that morning, the birds were singing and we felt at peace. Once in the car, I started it up, the exhaust banged against the diff and the engine light came on… Fuck this holiday.

We drove into the town centre to have a look. While Becky took a look at the lovely town buildings, I messed about with the tie wire on the exhaust, as it was banging about a bit. While doing this I slammed my hand into the ground. Fuck this stupid fucking holiday.

A building from happier days

We’d booked a hotel room in central Adelaide, but as we couldn’t check in until 2pm, we drove to a beach just south of the city to have a picnic lunch. It was a lovely bit of coastline, and wasn’t too chilly either. Perhaps things were starting to look up again.

Happiness is being away from the car

The hotel we’d booked didn’t have free parking, but as it was a Sunday we had assumed there would be places to park nearby for free. WRONG! The hotel was on a street with very little parking, and all of it taken. We had to opt for the hotel’s paid parking area, but found out that this had a height restriction of 2m, and we were 2.4m with everything on the roof. Fucking stupid car and crappy holiday.

Not built for city living

It was Becky’s turn to melt down and my turn to be the level headed one. My plan was to empty as much of the inside of the car as possible in to the hotel room, and then unload the dirty stuff on the roof into the car. It worked and we edged through the underground parking gate, with only millimetres to spare. In busy towns, the cruiser feels like a tank… a shitty old tank.

Hurdle cleared and the car parked, we did what we always do in cities we’ve never been before; we sat in our room surfing the Internet. We also discussed if we still wanted to do this whole road-trip thing. It was all starting to feel like hard work, and we were boring ourselves with the amount of moaning we were doing. That evening it pissed down, but thankfully we were in a lovely room with solid walls and a roof. The room was great, with lovely views from the twelfth floor and the bed was very comfy. The only downside was we could hear the dumf dumf of young people music playing at a local club. As we were both so tired, it didn’t keep either of us awake for long. However, it did keep us awake between 5am-6am, when it was still going. I hate young people.

Up and almost refreshed, we set about our daily tasks. The first was to take the car to Bob Jane T-mart to fix the tyre under warranty. They told us a small nail had caused the puncture, but at least the work on the tyres cost us nothing, so that was good. We then took the car to an exhaust place, and left it with them for the day. It was a 3km walk back to the hotel, which gave us plenty of time to moan about our situation and how unlucky we’ve been. We walked through the centre of Adelaide; well, what we assumed was the centre, as we didn’t really check.   

Nice big balls

Even through our grumpy glasses, it seemed a nice place. We did see quite a few people who looked the worse for wear, which we put down to the ice epidemic gripping SA, a conclusion we came to based on a half-watched news program we saw years earlier... so definitely 100% true then.

Looks nicer than pasta stir-in

Later that afternoon we went and picked up the car from the exhaust guy. He’d welded the metal bracket and changed the rubber bracket. He mentioned that the rubber bracket looked very old and worn. This was strange, as it has been replaced twice on this journey, so either we have been conned for a very cheap part, or the roads we’ve been on have just been that rough. It was only $90, which sounds like a lot but isn’t in the big scheme of our cars problems and fixes.

We enjoyed a final night in our lovely hotel, watching YouTube videos and discussing what we should do next. It was then we decided that, as we'd holidayed in Victoria and NSW before and really couldn’t face another period in the cold south, we should head to warmer climes, and the familiar humidity of QLD. Once there, we could decide if we would just jack it in or drive north again, and maybe end the holiday amongst the cassowaries we failed to see all those months ago.