Saturday 24 May 2014

May 2014: Willowglen, NSW

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What if I break my leg and cant drive? What if I am bitten by a snake? What if I have problems with my eyes and I cant see? What if I need someone else to drive to the nearest town for more beer?

These are not normally the kinds of questions I have with my wife but they were important seeing we are about to head off on our trip to the outback.

While Kathy is a very capable driver (I had to say this as she is probably reading this post) and drives the 4WD every day to and from work, I realised that the speed humps in the local shopping centre were probably not a good enough test of what we may experience over the coming months. So with this in mind we went and did the 4WD training course which is run by the Toyota Landcruiser Club which we are a member.

This involved 2 days of learning:

The difference between winches to snatches (I though this related to previous people I knew);
dead man anchors (lets hope I never need to do that);
why high lift jack are designed for macho men to stick on their car roof and serve no other real purpose;
how to repair a tyre with a piece of chewing gum, string and kitchen fork (well something like that);
successful water crossings without being eaten by crocodiles (it turns out children are the perfect size for walking the rivers to see how deep they are);
how to climb steep hills and then come down them again without rolling over;
how to avoid large rocks jumping out and damaging the car (oops – I don’t think I leant that this weekend)

It was a great chance to really experience where the car is capable of going. It also turned out that the women drivers mastered the course better than many of the men on the course…..except me obviously.