May 20, 2009
In the evening I decided we needed to get a roofrack tonight, and that relying on hope wouldn’t cut it, so we just had to move. I have a friend from my work at the salad bar, and he has a van with the bar parts of said racks. Dilemma though: he needed to drive the car to the coast and catch a plane to Rockhampton the next day, and he didn’t have any tools to get it off.
We needed some allen keys, so we shot off to Coles and grabbed a set. When driving back I dropped the keys and couldn’t find them on the floor of the car. I thought that maybe I’d knocked them onto the ground outside in opening the door. Pity that by this time the world had started to shit itself with water. While looking on the wet grass and the dry floor Haesh asked me to move the car seat. When I did it smacked my face (clumsy enough!) and sent my glasses down. My frigging vision! Next thing I know Tomos (the van’s owner and all round great guy) has come over and I scream to him that I’ve dropped my glasses in this surging gutter of storm. He hightailed it, tearing down the street to the drain at the end and plunging both hands into the mess, pulling out nothing. I freaked out. I can’t see a damn thing without them. What to do? Tomos ran back to the car and we looked on the ground again. He pulled them out from under the front wheel, submerged and rushing with water. Hurrah! So I hugged him, of course. And what a guy – lending us the rack for a pack of six, getting soaked with us as we then tried to get them off with the allen keys, restoring my sight from the water. Yet after all this mixed mayhem we discovered that we couldn’t move the rusted bolts. Tom just gave us the keys to his van, his blessings and asked that we didn’t crash the thing. He even offered me some marshmallow chocolate but I declined (rude vegan). We left for home, thankful for the good man, glad to see the end of the insane Brisbane weather.
In the evening we got together and discussed our itinerary, making last minute amendments, booking our skydiving near Cairns. Administration and stuff. A bit of a calm down after the mad rain / roof rack shemozzle. Let’s hope we can get this sorted and leave.
