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I was really excited about my new truck. After picking it up from the dealership, me and my new Canadian friend, Jason, headed straight to K-Mart to pick up much needed supplies. I bought about $600 worth of crap for the thing: lounge chairs, plates, napkins, The Club, an extra set of keys, tacky but chic leopard print seat covers, some outstanding stick on lettering that read "Australia Overland www.pgordon.com", plastic containers of all kinds, a jerry can for extra petrol, etc...
After that, we stopped at the liquor store and bought 2 cases of beer, a bottle of each of the essential bar stock, some mixers, and some ice. We were set.
That
night, Jason and I were trying out the bar facilities of the truck
next to a popular hostel in the Kings Cross area of Sydney. A
few people joined us, and it quickly turned into the happening
event on the block. A big group of guys from around the world
drank beer and celebrated the dawn of a new trip for me: Australia
Overland. They were all very jealous of my excellent new acquisition.
The next morning, Jason and I set out for a "trial run" in the truck. We decided to go to the Blue Mountains, a quick 2 hour drive from Sydney, but perfect for testing out the thing. Carsten, a Brit who joined the party the night before, decided to tag along as well. Finally, a ROAD TRIP!
About 60km outside of the city, I decided to stop and fill up with gas. $110 Australian later, 100 liters of petrol filled the truck and we were off. The music was pumping. Carsten was trying out the bar facilities in the back. We were all psyched for a good three days of offroading, partying, and playing.
A
few kilometers back on the highway, I noticed a severe degradation
in performance. I had the gas pedal floored, but I was getting
about 2000 RPM and no acceleration. I was worried. So, I changed
gas tanks (the truck has two which are controlled by an electronic
switch on the dash board). The car sputtered. It heaved. It coughed.
It blew billowing clouds of blue smoke from the exhaust. It gave
me just enough power to get to the median of the highway. Surprisingly,
I remained quite calm and in a good mood. There was something
really comical about spending $13,000 US on a car to have it breakdown
less than 70 kilometers from the dealership.
Jason, a self-proclaimed "pretty good mechanic" thought I had air in fuel line. He decided to bleed the lines using a little button under the hood that I didn't even know existed. I started it up and it spewed smoke. Clearly, we needed help. So, I used my cell phone and called the Australian version of Automobile Association, the NRMA, to which I had been given a membership to by the car dealership. I requested a tow. "We'll be there in an hour or so," the operator said.
An
hour? Well, that's a lot of time. Since the sun was shining and
it was a relatively nice day, we decided to get some sun. So,
we pulled out the lounge chairs, set them up in the median and
then cracked open a beer. Passing motorists honked and waved as
they sped by. We desperately needed a mechanic to stop and see
if he could fix the problem.
"We could put up a sign!" I said to the guys. Brilliant, they said. So, I made a sign and taped it to the back of the truck:
This sign generated a lot of interest during the next hour. Every passing motorist waved and honked. No one took us up on the free beer, however.
After two and a half hours, the tow truck pulled up. After describing the problem, the driver suggested that I might have put the wrong petrol in the tank. The truck is a diesel. DIESEL! I checked my receipt and to my horror I discovered that my DIESEL engine now had 100 liters of Premium Unleaded. Arrrrgh! The tow driver made me feel a bit better when he suggested that it probably wasn't going to be that big a deal to fix.
So, we arrived at a mechanic some time around 4:30. They greeted us: "So, you are the three yahoos on the median in lounge chairs drinking beer, eh?" How did he know? "You guys were real super stars on the police scanner," he said. We were famous!
Anyway, they began working on the car and my dread deepened as they started draining all the petrol, removing the filters, etc. It was clearly more of a problem than I thought it would be. At 5:15, the lead mechanic decided he had to call home to tell his wife he was going to be late. After the phone call, I asked him if he was in trouble. "No," he said, "she asked if it was the three guys drinking beer in lounge chairs in the median -- she drove past you guys a few hours ago." We were famous!
An hour later, I paid the garage a few hundred bucks and we were on our way. ROAD TRIP!
Four blocks later, the car sputtered and spewed smoke again. It stopped completely dead in the middle of a very busy intersection. I checked all the gauges and quickly determined that the stupid mechanics forgot to drain the rear tank! I was using the rear tank. This stressed me out to an incredible degree. It was a relief to remember that I could switch (yet again) to the good fuel tank. Jason bled the lines. We had power enough to hobble back to the garage. An hour later, we were fixed for good and hit the road to the Blue Mountains.