Oh Dear

This one is difficult to write...

We had a lovely at Mount Glorious with a picnic and a walk in the rainforest. Eloise walked around 2.5km to the bottom of the path where a waterfall was empty of water that was not falling.

At that point, and this is a pivotal moment in a way, it started raining.

We toddled, well hurried really, back to the car and sought a place to retire to for coffee. Gary congratulated Eloise on her effectiveness as an umbrella. Eloise is very fond of Gary and Julie, shouting "Julie" predominantly but quite often "Gary" to demonstrate this, but I don't know if she'd counted sitting on someone's shoulders all the way to keep the rain off as part of the bargain... only joking.

Everywhere serving coffee was closed. So we headed home.

The road back home is very steep. And it had been raining. I was driving very carefully. But as we were coming up to a corner, running downhill at about 30km/h I applied the brakes and the car just kept on going.

I remember thinking to myself, as the crash barrier slid closer, that the best thing to do in these circumstances was to pump the brakes, but that felt like the least natural thing in the universe to do.

Then I remember thinking to myself, as the crash barrier slid closer, some wordless concept to the effect of "Oh, bugger."

Yes, I'm afraid it's true. We, the Royal We that is, have crashed the car.

Nobody is hurt. We weren't going very fast. There was a crunch as the car bounced off the crash barrier. But nobody was hurt. Over the crash barrier, the hill falls steeply away with its steep forested slopes.

As I stood there, after the event, standing by the road in a state of I Can't Believe This Is Happening, I waved at the next car that came along to tell them to slow down. They drove post very slowly.

A couple of minutes later they came back up the hill and stopped to help us. Nicole was busily phoning the RACQ, Gary was checking out the damage. I wandered over, in a state of disbelief, and had a look at a pretty well dented driver's side front corner bit. The bit with the headlight on. Ah. And the boot. That dripping would be windscreen stuff then. If that wheel arch was pried further away from the wheel it would be driveable maybe.

At this point Mr. French - Nicole is trying to find out his real name - has come over to help, and we look up in surprise as his car starts to roll down the hill, backwards, with Mrs. French inside, shaking her arms perplexedly at her husband in a what the hell's going on kind of way.

"Appuiez le brake de main!" is what I re-translate his words from French to English to Franglais to, he shouts as his car hits the crash barrier too.

Me, I can't believe that just happened, but that's applied to the entire five or so minutes up until now.

Mr. and Mrs. French, once a tow truck is organised via the RACQ is organised by my Excellent Wife, offer a life home to anybody that interested. They are new to Australia and don't really know their way about, but it turns out Grange is on the way to where they live anyway, practically. We decide that Nicole, Eloise and Julie should go back with them.

They drive off, and from what I hear, Nicole was in a daze, quite underdstandably, as they never actually introduced each other. Nicole is trying to track them down so that we can thank them more properly for the help they gave us yesterday.

Gary and I stayed behind, and I stood around also in a daze really as we looked at the damage and I magnanamously let Gary have a go at getting the wheel arch bit further away from the wheel so maybe we could get the chance to cancel the two truck and save several hundred dollars.

It was all looking pretty achievable, but starting to get dark and I got a text message to say that I had a missed call on the mobile - Nicole's new one, mine's broken -- typical! -- after some irrelevant encounter with water. I surmised that this would have been the two company, and I haven't answered the phone, and oh dear there's no signal, we now we don't actually know that they're even coming.

So I wandered round for a bit trying to find a vestige of signal on this heavily forested steep hill side in a mass of heavily forested steep hills about 10km from the nearest mobile mast probably. And heventually got through to the RACQ to ask them what the status is on the tow truck and could we cancel it. And, while they're checking, my call dropped out.

Laughably, in order probably to avoid confronting properly the reality of the situation I found myself in, I found myself wondering how the RACQ PABX might be designed and whether the A-leg dropping from a call on hold might affect the other call in progress. Old habits apparently die hard.

The second time, I gave them a number to call me back on, and hovered around the only bit of good signal I could find giving thumbs up to all the people who stopped to ask if we were OK.

I wondered if it could be a bad place to stand. Clearly there was a patch of oil there or something as I had been driving to the conditions, very slowly, and hadn't braked hard when the car skidded. I wondered whether someone else might repeat the mistake so I did make the assumption that the Aussie hand signal for "slow down" was the same as the English.

When the RACQ called back we - well mostly Gary, to whom considerable gratitude is owed, really - had the wheel good and free and I cancelled the tow truck. In fact the guy had only just left (this was about an hour later) and could just proceed to his next job. No charge to us.

I very hesitantly started the engine and we trundled away. The car drove absolutely fine, in fact we observed when we got back that both headlights were still working.

To cut a long story less long but probably still frankly long, Ric and Cate were tremendously understanding, I am deeply embarrassed in a sort of it-wasn't-my-fault-really and yet it-bleeding-well-obviously-was and yet there-was-nothing-i-could-have-done-differently way. And very, very, annoyed.

The car, the insurance company tells us, will be away at the car hospital for a good while. Maybe three weeks.

I've had to fix my puncture. Today has, by contrast, seemed very mundane. In a sort of "I'm alive" kind of way.

Gah. I'm going to watch the news.