Some Brisbane Guy

There are a few things you need to be able to do before you can be considered a Real Man(tm). Change a flat tyre, scull a pint of beer (if not a yardy), read a map and, most importantly, tie a truckie’s knot.

Until today I was the girliest tier of knots ever. Whenever I tried to tie something to a truck or a ute it looked like I’d gently laid the rope over the load then just rubbed the end of the rope around in my palms until it became knotted like a 5-year old schoolgirl’s hair, and driving to the destination would involve several stops to allow me to repeat the tying process. You can imagine my shame!

Everyone in my family is moving at the moment for one reason or another (including me) and that means shifting stuff around in utes, trucks and trailers. Today one of my jobs was to move a particle board computer desk on a ute from one end of Brisbane to the other (well actually from Pine Rivers to Redlands through Brisbane, but whatever…), with a chair as well and a tarp over the whole lot that we specially bought for this journey in case it rained. It didn’t rain.

I had to stop twice at the side of the freeway to redo my granny knots, they weren’t working at all and I thought the desk and chair were going to end up inside somebody else’s car - via their windscreen. The amount of times I’ve been standing on the side of the freeway being blown off my feet by semi trailer draught winds is ridiculous so it’s really for my own safety that I’ve finally learned how to tie a decent knot.

Finally I pulled off the freeway at the Nudgee exit and parked out the front of the Nudgee Golf Course. I knew the time to dither and hesitate was through and that I just had to bite the bullet and learn this thing. With weary, frustrated fingers I brought up Opera Mini on my phone and Googled for “truckie’s knot”. Before long I’d found the Queensland Mitsubishi 4WD Owners’ Club’s page Get Knotted - Part II which has great pics and instructions for the truckie’s knot, and I diligently followed with newfound enthusiasm for the land of ropes and knots and load-carrying.

I struggled for a little while with the loops and the bights and the cloves and the hitches but it wasn’t long before I had myself a real, live truckie’s knot! I was elated! I felt so manly, I wanted to have beers in a pub while eating pies and fighting big hairy blokes, bleeding and vomiting and drinking more beer and swearing and talking about footy.

Yeah, I’m a real man today.

My Dad and I went with some friends on the 2007 Camp Quality esCarpade rally. We’re still in Tasmania as I write this but we’re heading back on the plane tonight — thank the Lord we don’t have to drive all the way back to Queensland.

The 2007 esCarpade started in Canberra and Dad drove down from Brisbane with Ray and Tracie (they’re from Gympie and supplied the car) in our HZ Holden Kingswood rally car “The Red Baron” with its 202 Holden motor (3.3 litre), Commodore 4-speed gearbox with sticky linkages, flashing orange lights for dirt roads, knobbly dirt tyres and big steel boxes on top for luggage which you need because the boot fills with dust when you’re bashing down gravel roads.

Everything was going great until before the rally had started when on Thursday arvo, 150km out of Canberra the old six cylinder started spewing oil all over the place and making some unhappy noises. They limped into sunny Canberra as gently as they could, where the esCarpade organisers gave them the number of a top bloke named Charlie of Hughes Mechanical, who were also the support team for the “Ours” esCarpade team. This guy was awesome and the lads worked their asses off until late in the night to get a new motor into the old beast and have it running again for scrutineering the next morning!

So the team managed to enter the rally with a new motor and I was airlifted in Friday night so that I could be there for the start of the rally on Saturday morning.

We headed off with Tracie at the wheel and the old Kingy seemed to be running sweet as a nut until we noticed some banging noises underneath the back end, and it started wagging its tail like a dog over any kind of corrugations. Tracie held on through some hairy moments as the car waggled around on the gravel and we started to think something could have been wrong. We stopped for lunch and had a quick look but everything seemed fine, and then it was my turn to drive.

We were pretty convinced something was pretty messed up under the back of the car as it tried to swap ends any time the road got bumpy and it was scaring the crap out of all of us, and embarassing us too as pretty much every other car in the rally flew past us and we were eating their dust. So we stopped and jacked up the car and we didn’t even have to take of a wheel to notice that the passenger side shock absorber was just hanging around and had snapped at the top where it mounts to the chassis. That explained a few things…

So once again the car was limping to Canberra after every car parts shop in Yass was closed. Repco in Canberra weren’t keen to sell us a pair of shocks over the phone by credit card and they were going to close before we got there, but some desperation, harassment and cajoling eventually convinced Brian to take our credit card over the phone and leave our package of salvation out the back behind a rubbish bin. Then it was Charlie to the rescue again, he put the car on his hoist and had the shocks changed in literally ten minutes and we were driving on with smiles on our dials.

Heaps and heaps more stuff happened on the trip with plenty of cars having mechanical dramas, navigational problems and driving indiscretions, but it was heaps and heaps of fun and in total all the cars raised over $917,000, which was nearly two hundred thousand more than 2006. A top effort.

So now the plan is to build up a car of our own, get some sponsorship and go again next year. Should be awesome.