HOLIDAY FROM HELL

It was the holiday from hell. Like something out of a Chevy Chase movie. Let’s take it how it developed. And it makes me look like a real dill.

It was going to be a romantic weekend at Mt. Macedon. My old stamping, or stomping, ground. I had had a farm and a vineyard there and visited almost every weekend for about twenty years but had not been there much since the ANZ bank decided they wanted it and I lost it.

There have been a lot of highway changes and improvements since I was last there and I boasted to my partner that a trip from Melbourne that used to take more than an hour was now a “walk in the park”. Only 45 minutes. I was “blowing the carbon” out of a 1984 Cadillac I bought myself for my birthday.

It took me about two hours after taking a wrong turn at Sunbury. We almost made it to Bacchus Marsh. And then it started to go really bad.

I asked a farmer for directions and he was laconic and succinct. He had a sign outside saying he was selling horse manure and I told him was in the s---. Then my partner touched the car door, which was locked, and triggered and set off an alarm that would guarantee no ear wax for a year.

I dived in the car, inserted the key and turned the motor on. I now surmise that is what a thief would have done and so the wax-clearing alarm went off again. I jumped out and shut the door. It’s a self-locking Cadillac.

So there we were. Somewhere in Victoria on a desolate country road with a locked car, with the key inside and the motor running. Good call Derryn. But the gods were smiling.

A young woman named Karen stopped and asked me for an autograph because she had seen me on Dancing with the Stars. My partner asked if she had a wire coat hanger. She did. Because, she said, she bred horses. I didn’t, and don’t, understand that connection.

I broke the loop off the hanger and my partner asked if she had another one and she did. We got into the car and finally made it to the Mountain Inn at Mt. Macedon.

Next day, on the way home in the new Caddy, she said: “Wouldn’t it be funny if we ran out of petrol. Wouldn’t that be the icing on the cake”. We did. There we were trudging along the Calder Highway looking for the emergency phone.

She said, like something out of Ghostbusters, “who you gunna Call?” I said that I hadn’t the faintest idea.

I said that the only thing that could happen now was if I got bitten by a farm dog.

We found another farmhouse. Two giant Rottweilers came after us. She said “don’t look at them” The guy who owns its runs a furniture factory out the back. He tells he me he made my first desk when I did HINCH at Channel Ten. Six degrees of separation.

He pointed to Keilor where I could get a full tank. And we almost swiped a fast-moving car while getting across the lanes to get there.

On the way home my partner had told me a story about a guy in America who had forgotten to take the hose out of the car while filling up his Merc and had pulled the bowser over and demolished the whole service station. I laughed. Too soon.

We got to the servo. Somehow, in the huge Caddy beast, I collected three hoses and tore them loose. Petrol was spraying everywhere, with hoses coiling and acting like snakes. It was the first time I had heard my partner use a four letter word.

But, as Rodger Miller would sing ”on the road again”. About the time I was reassuring her how great it was to see the Melbourne skyline and how close we were to home, she pointed out that smoke was billowing from under the bonnet.

We had run out of oil. The gods were still sort of smiling as I limped to another service station. A tanker driver was dumping a load of petrol and he came to my help. We poured nearly four litres of oil into the Caddy beast. And I managed to cautiously drive home.

Feeling guilty, after such a traumatic trip, I decided to take my partner for a late lunch-early dinner. A bowl of mussels would be wonderful.

We were relaxing ,finally , having a cold white wine after the travel disasters, and discussing the merits of mussels and why, occasionally, some don’t open when steamed. I opined that they just didn’t. And people didn’t try to eat them because they could get juice spurted on them if they struggled with them.

I’ve since been told that they don’t open because they are dead and you shouldn’t eat them. My partner managed to open one, eat it, and then

threw up all night.

It sort of summed up the weekend.

May 22, 2005

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2005