My first day in our new home-town as an official local, a real estate agent knocked on our front door.
I had to pull aside bean bags, boxes, fire wood and the wooden panelling we'd stripped off the stone walls to open the rickety front door - and then he asked me if we were looking to sell any time soon.
So I console myself that we've made a good choice - even with more sheds than Bunnings, even with dodgy wiring and shoddy septics, this place has got potential - and he hadn't even seen the view over the back fence.
Our first week at Gladstone The Dog cut his paw on a piece of old iron, both cars blew up and a dodgy, home-wired plug melted and blew the entire house's electrics.
I would have cried except, for the first time in years, we had the time to deal with all the everyday things that go wrong everywhere.
So I bundled the kid and the wounded dog into the stalling falcon and hoped that moment would keep the car going from the top of the Flinders Ranges all the way to the Ford dealer in the nearest major city...and we almost made it too.
The car shuddered to a halt at the highway T-junction into the city, with cars banked up behind me and B-doubles zooming along in front.
But - don't ever let anyone tell you chivalry is dead - because men erupted from the cars behind me all keen to give me a push, the car started and I drove a good 2km in the wrong direction until I could do a u-turn on a hill and nurse my shuddering, creaking, stalling vehicle to the city where it rolled into the carpark of the dealership and promptly defied all of the mechanics' efforts to restart it for the next week.
We then walked - two sleepy kids and a footsore dog - to the vet which, thankfully, was right next door to McDonalds, making it easier to bribe the children into patience.
I had a hard time explaining why both the dog and the car were enjoying 'sleep-overs' in the city but the kids had to go home.
No comments:
Post a Comment