Off Road and On the Brink

I am one of those people who finds motorised transport in all its forms endlessly interesting. It’s OK, in polite company I can usually keep a lid on it, it’s not like I interrupt conversations to talk about the best and brightest cars and Utes. But get me on the subject and you’d better have something important to say if you’re going to interrupt me. I’ve limited myself to two vehicles, though, which considering I came into a pretty big inheritance unexpectedly a few years back I think is pretty restrained. In fact, I paid for the second out of my own money after saving money from my wages – I just thought it was important to keep a bit of perspective, because money won’t last forever if you behave like a moron.

The two vehicles are a perfectly good road car which is more or less irrelevant to the story I’m about to tell and a 4x4 which is essential for some of the jobs that I go on as a vet. There would be ways to get to the farms and private houses that I need to visit in an ordinary car, but it would need to be replaced after a few years, and I’m not about to drive a 4x4 around the city centre. I know too many people who do that and seem to think they are Julius Caesar or someone, and I used to know one guy who was doing that very thing when he hit a schoolgirl and she ended up in hospital for some time. He showed no remorse about what he’d done so now his occasional text messages tend to get deleted after a courtesy read.

There are times when you need a 4x4, though, and by way of a side-effect to my pressurised cross-state dashes to help a stricken horse or family pig I have developed a love of off-road driving. Some of the best camping weekends I have had involved hearing my phone go and a friend telling me we were going to get back to nature. Somehow there’s no way not to make that sound suggestive, by the way.

On one occasion back in 2006, I had the mother of all punctures in one of my front wheels, at exactly the point where it became too far to walk back to the nearest town and pick up a spare tyre. The one I was carrying was, itself, somewhat damaged due to me leaving it too close to my tools and being careless with some luggage. So I had to sit and wait it out while my friend called his wife to drive out with the spare that was in his garage. It took three hours, the sun was splitting the trees and I was reaching the point of insanity when I remembered the hydration pack in my glove box. I’ve never got through a litre of water so fast in my life. Everything was fine in the end, but I tended to give camping trips a miss for a few weeks afterwards.