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Show Me the Way to go Home……or else.

A relatively short post tonight. I’m pretty knackered from all the sitting in air conditioning and eating burritos. It’s a tough job.

Anyway we snuck out of Sydney under cover of darkness this morning. I was so sleepy in the car I didn’t even notice the Asian hookers walk past until Mike pointed them out. Can’t believe my bad luck but we did manage to see two lesbians kissing in their car while we were parked at the lights…so the world is in alignment again.

The drive from the Big Smoke to the Nations Capital was pretty uneventful except I’m still wondering why we passed two police cars and five police peering over the edge of a bridge into a ravine on the Hume Highway this morning. Perhaps I’d better check the news?

It was also pea soup for most of the way. Making sight-seeing a little dull.

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We spent the day just catching up with a couple of teams. Sympathising with cracked engine blocks but being happy for them that the rally hadn’t started proper yet.

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Most of the day was based around locating a few spots around Stromlo Forest and surrounds where there will be a testing day for teams tomorrow. We managed some epic uphill battles, almost collected some Roos as hood ornaments, and even threw in a small creek crossing for good measure.

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My whiney big girls blouse complaint for the day is with GPS units. Mike’s seemed to delight herself in giving us late or completely incorrect instructions. Sending us hurtling through intersections onto roads that hadn’t been built yet. Or her sultry voice was whispering for us to use the roundabout to turn around.

That vixen of road maps needed a good pixel slapping. We used way too much time having to make U-turns because she hated men.

We’d switch to the male GPS voice and he’d be like “yeah just drive down there mate. If you happen to pass a pub then make sure you stop for a quick coldie.” As soon as we’d put the female voice on she was giving us shopping lists, telling us about her latest new discovery of chai tea, or complaining about that slutty Tom Tom in the car next to us. If she did decide to give us actual road directions she was either late, not caring, or utterly wrong. If she had hands she would have put one up with a disgruntled “oh no you just DIDN’T”.

My imaginary experiment would be to pick out the windiest route possible and stick her annoying nasal voiced unit into a Bugatti Veyron and tear off at lightning speed. Imagine the electronic cow trying to keep up instructions as we hurtle through the streets at 400km/h. She would even get the first vowel out before having to work out the next turn or ‘recalculate’. My mind turns to darkness and evil laughter as I picture the GPS giving up the ghost with just a small whiff of smoke drifting from it’s plastic corpse.

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VW Drag Day – WSID Sydney

Saturday was hot..really hot. Not ‘surface of the sun’ kind of Western Australian hot, but a nice sweaty humid ‘the more I walk the greasier my ballbags’ kind of hot.

Our intrepid No H2O leader Simon/Humpty had flown across from Perth to attend the days racing so I picked him up from his hotel carpark full of early morning drunks and crack whores, and we proceeded to get totally lost on the way to the track. Well I should say it was me who got lost, and I have no excuse as the hotel was next to the track. My job was to go from Point A to Point B and back to Point A again and I managed to screw that up. So after a good 45 minutes of driving in circles I gave up my rights as a man and resorted to using electronic devices to find our way back.

The WSID carpark was pretty full of every type of vw. bugs, splits, notches, water coolers, the works. It was a pretty awesome turnout and some serious machinery and money spent. It was nice to be able to relax and grab some photos and video of the day and not be pushed to publishers deadlines or shot lists for a change.The only thing missing was a couple of cold beers.

There’s a whole photo album of images here and also a pretty dodgy video I threw together on YouTube located here.

Racing was interesting. The WSID people were certainly a lot more straight and narrow than their Western counterparts at Motorplex. One explained that the strictness co-incides with the amount of people looking for an excuse for a lawsuit on the east coast as compared to the west. The venue brought out more photographers than competitors as well. Where were they all for the Victorian and Queensland rounds? Sydney lacks a sense of friendliness there. The competitive natures and the lack of a simple g’day to strangers goes against the entire philosophy of vw ownership. It didn’t sit right with me so I was kind of glad to leave.

I packed up from the hotel mid afternoon and my next stop was Bathurst, about three hours up through the Blue Mountains. The Kombi made mince meat of the hills, being light and with an average size motor. It’s a great drive up there despite the roadworks and procession of caravans. It’s a windy drive but reasonably scenic in spots with some great old stone buildings and open plains leading out to giant rugged clifftops. My destination was Rocklea to crash at a mate’s place and meet up with our other Circlework photographer, Jeff, who had been in town a couple of days already. I’d forgotten that Rocklea had zero phone reception unless by satellite so it was interesting to just relax for a couple of drinks at the local pub and not be tempted by phone calls, internet or facebook updates.

We had a pretty early night as we’d planned a 4am start to drive back to Mount Panorama for the Bathurst 12 Hour production race on Sunday…

VW Trip – Manjimup 2007

After our stop off at the blues festival we continued south on to Manjimup where fellow dubber Sam let us do a spot of executive camping inside his plane hangar for the night.