More than just a car

It happened, last week actually, Voa had a break down. It all happened in Mt. Surprise after driving for a fair while, and then having to use a drive-through a weed seed shower (shower heads on both sides and under the car which blast a you with heaps of water). After which Voa decided to have a bit of melt down. It lost a lot of power in the gas pedal, and the rear diff started to make some noise.

A few hundred kilometers down the road, in the town of Atherton, I take a right turn, and the car cuts out. Awesome.

I try very briefly to fix it, but call RACQ (roadside assistance) shortly after. A guy rocks up about 40 minutes later and pokes around the engine and gets running again, but guarantees me that it will occur again, and that I need to take it to a mechanic and what should be fixed.

Rock up to Cairns and park outside my friends share house for the night and try to drive away the next day to do some exploring. Nah. Voa wouldn't have it. Call RACQ again, but the mechanic tells me pretty much the same thing as the previous one and tells me that it would be pointless to get it running this way (which he believed to be quite doubtful in the first place).

Take it to a mechanic the next day and tell them what problems were described to me. He gives me a jolly smile and tells me he'll be in touch. Next day he tells me what his boys found and says that they needed to fix a bunch of gaskets first before they dared to drive it on the road. Tell them to fix it, and once they fixed it, they said that they had it running perfectly fine. Next was the rear diff. It was only a crappy bearing, which got replaced as well. Price of all this, about a third of all the money I put into her in the first place.

You may be thinking that it's a lot of money (which it is), but for me, it's the equivalent of granny with the dinosaur for a dog pumping it full of medicine trying to keep it alive and breaking all the laws of nature and life and death.

Dogs are affectionate and show you love. True.

However, with Voa, I have learned how car enthusiast see cars as being more than cars. Voa has not only been my car, it's my home, my way to meet people, and source of a lot of fun.

I was in a share house here in Cairns, and will be leaving tomorrow or Tuesday.

I'll be stopping off in Brisbane to work for a week (hopefully) to try to get back the money I spent on the car.

Be in Bello for my birthday and then just...yeah, take it from there.

I'm off!