Oh, What a Feeling
Wrapping up the Torago story: (For those of you not on my friends list, my parents' Toyota Torago overheated somewhere in the Greater Hume Shire on my drive back from Victoria last Saturday.) I left it at the motel that night and flew to Sydney. The motel owners were kind enough to let me do that, and to let me stay in the room for most of that day so I could dial into work. I brought them some chocolates and things when I next saw them-they rock. It's a really nice motel, too, with a spa and a pool with a little waterfall. It's the Crystal Fountain Motel on Wagga Road, Lavington, a northern suburb of Albury. You should stay there if you're looking for a place to crash in that part of the state.
YvonneZ, bradz and I drove down there again on Tuesday. bradz convinced me to rent a vehicle for the drive, instead of taking his van, and this was a good idea: even though it was a huge Commodore station wagon, I got about double the fuel economy as the Torago, and bradz reckons that his gas-powered van's economy wouldn't be any better on the open highway, either. It definitely wouldn't have been as comfortable.
I was really impressed with that Commodore, actually. I can't believe that an Australian-made car had more gadgets than I'd seen on any other vehicle, and given that I normally drive ZipCars, I drive a lot of different vehicles! The stereo had two auxillary inputs, so we could easily switch between my Treo, YvonneZ's laptop, and the radio for entertainment. In addition to the expected cruise control, it nagged us when we went too far over the speed limit, but we could tell it to shut up. Despite being a V6, it got us all the way to the Victorian border, via Canberra, on a single tank of petrol! It was a big tank-$75 to fill again-but the same distance cost me almost twice as much in the Torago with its lower-capacity, flat-four engine. It easily held all the stuff I'd left in the Torago, including one of my suitcases and a couple of big pieces of foam that form a king-sized bed, and had space left over to keep the three of us quite comfortable. But it didn't have a sunroof, and the Torago has two.
I had what we used to call NRMA Plus put on the Torago, so I was hoping they'd just tow it back to Sydney for free-they did that for my
Kombi once.
They had to send another patrol person out first, though, and he told me that they could only do that kind of towing if I couldn't find a mechanic who could repair it locally within 48 hours. Given most mechanics had only just gone back to work after the summer holidaze, that would've been an easy condition to satisfy, but this was less than 48 hours ago and I'm about to hop on a plane to San Francisco, so I couldn't hang around. But since he also said it was fine to drive it short distances, I took it across the border to Toyota in Wodonga-it ran just fine, to be honest. It was after hours by that time so I had to ring them the next day; they'll look at it on Friday, and my parents will deal with it after that.
The drive itself was a hot day on the Hume, featuring the usual giant sheep and legendary dog stops, and a less attractive rotting wombat somewhere near Bowral. It looks like McDonald's in Yass have finally realised what 'MYass' means to American tourists, so they've replaced that often-photographed billboard with something boring. We stopped to visit Jon, my ex in Canberra; he served us lunch and showed off his new deck, the harpsichord he's restoring, and the small, brass solar system thingie he's building.
The overall return trip was somewhere between 750 miles and 1250km. We'd left after I finished working on Tuesday, and arrived at about 4am on Wednesday, so I could just dial into work again. Not quite the fun road trip I'd hoped to do with bradz and YvonneZ and GRiPZ, but pleasant enough anyhow.
Update
I've been reading up some more on OpenID and found it's apparently possible to add OpenID logins to my friends list. So if you want to read friends-only posts but don't want to sign up for LiveJournal, you apparently just need to use your OpenID provider account (Flickr, GMail, etc.) to leave a comment here, and I can add you. Any of you want to be a guinea pig? (
littleboot, for example?
)