On the road

Eventually everything came together. The car was packed to the brim with just enough room to squeeze behind the wheel. A kiss, a hug, a farewell, and off I went. It was both a sad and exciting experience.

I wanted to pack as much as possible to help lessen the load when the big move took place, and I might have had to set up house in an unfurnished flat for months. So, I included a blow-up mattress, card table, folding chairs, crockery and the like, along with my personal stuff. It was comfortable enough in the car, but I couldn’t push or tilt the seat back had I wanted to, and I could barely see out the rear vision mirror, and the passenger’s seat was full too. The fuel economy wouldn’t have been too great, and getting to the spare wheel would have been difficult should I have needed it.

The drive out of Melbourne was perfect. It was a fine day, and an easy trip on the freeway was just what I wanted particularly with the car so precariously loaded. Albury is the half-way point, almost. It’s a great feeling when you cross the state border. It feels like you are really beginning to get somewhere; a landmark of the miles travelled.

So what happened to the freeway? Why is it that the Victorian government can provide a top class highway from one end of the state to the other (Melbourne to Wodonga) and when you get into NSW you are hit with a mixture of freeway and second-rate roads? This is Australia’s number one highway and all the NSW government can do is build sections of freeway interspersed with narrow single lane roads. With the amount of traffic that highway carries, it is dangerous.

The countryside in NSW along the Hume Highway is fabulous. The sun was going down behind me and it brought out the textures in the landscape. The view was unforgettable, and I can still see it in my mind’s eye. I wished I knew where I had packed the camera. I would have taken a few photographs. It must have been about half an hour before sunset, the shadows were getting long and the light was fading, and suddenly a bumping vibration started from under the car. It was a heavy, regular, fast vibration that pushed the car from left to right slightly. Oh no, a puncture. It felt like one of the rear wheels because the steering was still light. Thankfully this occurred on the freeway section of the road, and I was able to pull to the side of the road without bothering other road users in any way.

So, I stopped, got out, and walked around the car. All the tyres were okay. That was odd. I looked under the car, but it was getting dark and I didn’t have a torch. I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Everything seemed fine. I felt the tyres; they were warm but not hot. There was plenty of air in them. This was a mystery. There was nothing to do but get back in the car and go on. I took it easy, expecting something to fall off at any time, but there was no trouble. The car was running nicely. Perhaps one of the wheels had picked up something from the road that had stuck to one of the wheels, and now it was gone. Then just as I was beginning to relax, thump, it came back again. The car was trying to wobble all over the road. Is the suspension falling off, I wondered, and I immediately slowed down, and the vibration stopped. It was sensitive to speed. I thought I knew what it was; one of the wheel balance weights must have fallen off and the wheel was out of balance. Anyway, I stopped to have a look. As far as I could tell the wheel weights were all in place, and there was no sign of any weights missing, like a ‘clean’ spot on the wheel. It was almost dark now. I grabbed each of the wheels in turn at the top, and shook them as hard as I could. I was trying to feel for looseness. Everything seemed tight. Back into the car and I drove carefully. Everything was fine. I found that I could drive the car up to about 110km/hr and if the speed crept up too high the vibration started. Well that was an easy fix; watch the speed.

From then on the pleasure of the journey had gone. Whatever was wrong was getting worse. I couldn’t drive at 110 anymore, because the vibration started to kick in at 100km/hr, which was just fine because sections of the highway have a limit of 100 and that wouldn’t have bothered anyone else. As I took the turn off to Canberra at Yass I couldn’t drive any faster than 80, which would probably have been annoying for other road users. The highway is a narrow single lane road between Yass and Canberra, for most of the way, and there was me hogging the road. Luckily there wasn't much traffic.

There was one other thing that happened on this memorable trip. This little car had been in storage in a corner of the yard. The car had had a car cover over it for about a year or more. When I took the cover off and began to clean up the car, there were some little droppings over parts of the bonnet. I had also noticed that a few fibre pieces from under the bonnet had been ‘nibbled’ by something. I think a few little mice had been running around under the car cover and perhaps trying to set up home under the bonnet. We used to have chickens and a few ducks right next to where the car was parked, and if you have chooks you tend to have rodents. Anyway, although you wouldn’t call October a particularly cold month it gets chilly at night. So here I am on the highway with the sun going down, and the temperature dropping. So, what else do you do but turn on the heater, but all these little droppings I found on the bonnet when I took the car cover off must have only been part of it, and I suspect a bucket load of droppings had fallen into the heater vent that runs just in front of the windscreen. The smell that came out of the heater was nauseating. This stuff stinks in normal circumstances, but here was me plying hot air on it when I turned on the heater. It was switched off in a flash. Of course, the windscreen fogged up with no demister. So, on this beautifully clear, icy cold night, I drove with the window wide open. I finally reached my destination in one piece, but cold and weary.