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Easter Trip Reports - post'emhere! 7-Apr-2010 At 2:51:34 PM Hendo

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Back at the car none of us had Telstra mobile, but Eug had a teeny bit of reception. A few disrupted calls later our friends were informed we would not be joining them. NRMA roadside assistance informed us they didn’t cover people hitting things which sounded quite odd but what could we do? So we decided to sleep on it and deal with it in the morning. It was a fairly disrupted night sleep on the side of the road. At some early hour in the morning I awoke to feel the ground vibrating slightly. The morning mind haze sharpened quickly as the noise coalesced into the sound of a horse galloping toward me at a rapid rate and I remembered vaguely that in avoiding lying in the long grass I had curled up on what could have been an animal track. Though I was still trapped in my zipped up sleeping bag I sat up quickly and saw the beast thundering away safely along the inside of a fence a couple of meters away. (potentially dangerous incident no. 3)

After that I didn’t sleep much, a few people stopped by the car to check everything was ok but we were sleeping down the hill a fair way away so I wasn’t bothered to get up. Eug got up at his normal ungodly hour and started snapping sticks. I was mildly alarmed to learn later, given that we were sleeping in long grass, that this was part of his failed attempt to start a fire. (potentially dangerous incident no. 4)

Having survived a night of a number of potentially dangerous incidents I thought it best that we try to get out of the mess with as least pain as possible. The car started and given the conversation with NRMA the previous night it sounded like we might have to pay for a tow so we aimed to nurse the car slowly back to Singleton. Being a fairly large town with a train it seemed like a good place to aim for.

Not long down the road we noticed the battery light indicator came on. Hmmm that’s unusual. Keep going. Not much further a strange looking orange light appeared on the dashboard. A flick through the car manual reveals this as ‘miscellaneous warning light’, well yes we know we have a problem... We sail by Casilis (sp?) rest area, the steering cuts out and we are soon on the side of the road. Open up the slightly steaming hood and notice the alternator belt is loose. Damn, flat battery. We wandered around a little only to discover we truly have no mobile reception here. Thankfully we died near the rest area so we wandered up the road to find some rich Telstra Mobile possessing grey nomads. Saviours! We call NRMA again and find out the insurance arm is meant to deal with this. A long period of hold, a few questions, hold, new operator later, we are told the tow truck drivers in the area are busy but one will be along after finishing another job.

We sit back at the car and pull out the rack. I see Eug’s set of shiny new tricams and wonder what could have been. The big tricams are hilariously large and apparently stackable. A while later an NRMA car turns up with a trailer. The driver gets out and informs us his normal truck is in repair so we are stuck with this trailer that appears too short for the car. However we are in luck because we can all fit in his car whereas we would not have fit in the truck. He takes a few attempts to reverse the trailer inline with the car. After attaching the winch he finds the winch power box is dead. I don’t like my chances of pushing the car up onto the trailer so am relieved when his rummaging reveals some other battery thing which works. The car just squeezes on.

On the road again we trace back our steps toward Coolah. The driver informs us there is no public transport to Coolah, no train, no bus, the only way in or out of Coolah is via car and there are no hire cars or taxis. Excellent. On the plus side Coolah has no crime, a policeman, a golf course, a 25m pool, a school, a hospital with a whinging doctor, a supermarket and is a nice place to live. He is also able to point out from experience (without us telling him) the area where we hit the roo and proceeds to describes a number of previous accidents...I'm pleased Sam didn't swerve.

On arriving at Coolah I use a public phone for the first time in as long as I can remember (no mobile reception here either) to call the folks and ask them to pick us up. I suppose because it was Easter, there wasn’t much activity in Coolah so we sat in the main street and wasted away the next 4 or 5 hours until our ride out arrived.

A day later Eug and I decide on heading up to the Blue Mountains to ZigZag to climb a route I had bolted there a week or two ago with Mikl and to finally put those tricams into action. We open up the boot at ZigZag and Eug swears. He left the rope in his driveway.