Dreamworld, christmas and sports carnivals have always caused me restless nights as a kid but now I can add road trips to my short list of sleep killers. It’s like your brain is tormenting you because it knows you need sleep so you aren’t tired for the next day, but it still persists in talking to you the entire night like a bunch of teenage girls at a pyjama party.

It didn’t help that the night before we were due to leave I was running around panicked at 11pm because I couldn’t find the itrip for my ipod. To me this is more disturbing than forgetting your underwear because if I didn’t find it I wouldn’t have any music to annoy Danielle with. Luckily I found it in an extremely obvious place on the floor and my excuse is that for some reason I was the most stressed I’ve ever been.

Perhaps I was out of my tree with anxiety because I was borrowing my mothers newly purchased 1985 230SL model Mercedes to drive 2330 kms round trip to the traffic hell of Australia – Sydney. I suppose I could have borrowed her rusting Magna but my selfish need for bling overcame my concern for my mothers sanity. I had all these romantic visions of driving the countryside in a beautiful car and the unsexy magna just didn’t fit with that image. “Me and the Merc” sounds better in a blog than “Me and the Magna” doesn’t it? If I was going to drive up and down the Coffs Harbour strip with loud rap music it’s more authentic to bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce to Beyonce in a Merc’s spring loaded seats than the Magna’s bum numbing boards. I’m such a snob.

I was confident in the Mercedes engine as it drove brilliantly, but my confidence was a little shaken when I went to pick Danielle up to go grocery shopping for the journey. The car didn’t start. I’d been driving around all day doing errands for the car (i.e purchasing a windscreen wiper) looking at one of the lights on the dash wondering what it meant. I looked it up in the book and saw that it was indicating that the petrol was runnning on reserve. No worries, I thought, the indicator says it’s still a quarter full. I’ll get some petrol tonight when we go shopping. Alas, the indicator lied. Car no go cause car had no petrol. Just the thing you want to happen the night before a road trip! What can I say, I’m classy. 🙂 No fear, Pauline had a gas canister so I took my ever faithful alfa shopping and picked up the petrol on the way home – just enough to drive the merc to the petrol station in the morning. God help us if we break down.

So with the itrip safely packed away along with everything else except a hairbrush I rolled in to bed to toss and turn the night away. Not even “The New Detectives” could put me to sleep this time. I knew tomorrow was going to be a big day.

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