Stories from the car

9:13am 29/09/2008

We left about half an hour ago and have been on the Hume Highway the whole way. We passed a long stretch of road works which meant we had to slow down to 80 kilometres an hour and in some points as low as 40 kilometres an hour. But we're well on the way now.

As luck would have it, there was some unsecured Wi-Fi near where we stayed, and as long as it didn't drop out, it was actually quite fast. So yeah, I was able to check my email and other things. Hopefully I'll find some more Wi-Fi later so I can post this.

The place where we stayed was alright, but the beds were a bit uncomfortable. And I didn't realise I'd left my pillow in the car until I was lying down to go to sleep, which meant I didn't have that great a night's sleep. We had dinner last night at about 8:45 at a nearby restaurant. I had honey chicken, and that was really nice, but there was a bit too much of it, and after the McDonalds we'd had earlier, I struggled to finish it :P.

I guess I should tell the story about what happened to my two dogs Tammy and Toby, and why we set off 8 hours late. On Saturday night at about 10:30pm, we got a call from the 24 hour emergency animal hospital saying that they had two dogs that had just been dropped off, and that they'd identified Toby through his microchip. They were perfectly fine, but they'd been found wondering along a main road, getting close to a railway line. So we called the man who was looking after them to tell him that they'd been found, and got him to go pick them up. It turns out that they'd gone missing over three hours earlier, and he hadn't bothered to call us to let us know.

At about 11:15pm, me and Mum went out to the guy's house to pick the dogs up, because we just didn't feel right leaving them there anymore. When we got there, we found out that he hadn't told us that a rather big fighting dog (similar to a pit bull) would be staying there. This dog had ripped a couple of the wooden strips off of the wooden gate at the back, creating a hole big enough for our two dogs to get through. We think that Tammy escaped first, because she was going absolutely mad when Mum and Dad dropped her off earlier that day, and that Toby followed her, and then they stuck together while they wondered off down to the main road. Anyways, we got home from there at about 12:10am and went to bed shortly after, wondering what on earth we were going to do with the dogs the following day.

The next morning, Mum was lucky enough to get a friend of hers who looks after dogs to look after them for the time we were away. After they finally took them off again, we got around to packing the car and then finally, at 2pm, we finally got in the car and got moving.

We're about half an hour from Yass now I think, but we're not stopping until we get to Goulburn, further up the highway. Oh, and while I was writing this, I discovered that someone's gone and deleted four photos off my camera that I took last night at dinner. It's not the first time, but hopefully it'll be the la time. I' sick of having to to look after my camera so securely. I shouldn't have to worry about people deleting photos off my camera!! Anyways, I'll write more later. Hopefully I'll see something a bit more interesting then grass plain after grass plain to take photos of.

11:47am 29/09/20008

We stopped at Goulburn about an hour ago so Mum could get some sewing gear. Me and Andrew got some Egg and Bacon rolls for morning tea, so that was nice. We're only about 135 kilometres out from Sydney now, so we'll probably be arriving in about an hour and a half.

12:35pm 29/09/2008

We're getting very close to Sydney now, we're only about 50 kilometres out from the city. It'll be good to finally get there and get settled, albeit 16 hours behind schedule. It's gonna be cool to finally see things like Martin Place, the set of the breakfast TV show Sunrise, the Sydney Opera House, and also for those who didn't know, the place where all three of The Matrix films were filmed. We took a bunch of screenshots yesterday and we're going to see if we can find were they were taken :P.

I said yesterday that I was going to talk about the song Pork and Beans by Weezer. Here's the music video of it. You'll probably recognise a lot of the things in it if you've spent a lot of time on Youtube.

Here's the chorus:

I'mma do the things that I wanna do

I ain't gotta thing to prove to you

I'll eat my candy with the Pork and Beans

Excuse my manners if I make a scene

I ain't gonna wear the clothes that you like

I'm finally dandy with the me inside

One look in the mirror and I'm tickled pink

I don't give a hoot about what you think

This song kinda represents how I've changed in the last nine months. I've stopped caring what other people think of me when their opinions don't affect me. Sure, I used to say it a lot. But I know now that I really do mean it. I can stand on the corner of two major roads waiting for the lights to change and be quite free in myself to move around in time to the music that I'm listening to, just as I would if I was listening to it at home.

Part of the reason why we simply weren't ready to leave on Sunday morning is because on Saturday night we had another big argument. One of the things that came up was yet again caring what other people think of you. I made the point about what I said above. Mum said “those people in those cars must of thought you were one of those weirdos from Kew Cottages that were all released into the public” (Kew Cottages used to be a place for people to live who were mentally unfit to live in normal society. It's shut now, and the people who lived there were released (is that the right word? I'm not sure if they had a choice about living at Kew Cottages or not) back into the public.). Anyway, my instant response was “so what?”. And she simply could not get it through her head that it could be possible that I didn't care what those people thought of me. I've said many times to her, “once you can explain to me how you can get embarrassed in front of people you don't even know, maybe I'll take a bit more notice of some of the things you say”.

It's 12:55 pm now, and we're only about 25 kilometres from Sydney. As we get closer on the freeway there's more and more traffic, which means the speed limits are dropping too. Hopefully the city will be coming into view soon, just over the next hill maybe.

Oh great. We've just had to slow to a crawl because we're heading into a tunnel and there's smoke coming out the front. We just had to move over for a fire truck to pass.

Lol. It's just a grass fire right outside the tunnel. We're inside now and we're back to full speed. Jeez it's a long tunnel. We just passed a sign saying the exit wasn't for another 2 kilometres I think.

I just remembered that I was gonna write something more about the chorus from Pork and Beans. The line “I ain't gonna wear the clothes that you like” is quite literal with me. I have a lot of conflicts with Mum over the clothes I'm going to wear all the time, regardless of whether I'm going out or I'm just staying at home for the day.

Great, we just left the main tunnel and then entered a second one. Fortunately we're already out of it, and we're just passing by Sydney International Airport. Oooh, there's our first look at the city as well. Into another tunnel, out the other side, and we just passed Air Traffic Control. It's a tall building with a spiral staircase around the outside.

I guess I'll write some more soon. I'm gonna concentrate on taking photos now. Oh, and scanning for some Wi-Fi so I can post this :P. Woah. I just ran a scan for Wi-Fi points and a good 40-50 points must of come up. Sadly, most of them had security. I reckon we're moving too fast to get a proper connection though. Anyways, I'm gonna stop babbling now :P.

1:20pm 29/09/2008

Just got told that it's time to shut all this down, so I'm just gonna write a little entry now. We're nearly at our destination (the GPS just beeped). It's been fun driving around the city and seeing all the different Wi-Fi hotspot names (who names theirs “ejector seat reservation”?). Anyways, have to go. Seeya soon!