February 2008 Archives
My old mate Toot, while a great bus driver, can’t read a map to canada goose outlet new york city save himself. While some drivers I’ve worked with canadian goose jacket on tours in Europe will cruise down the autobahns with giant maps spread across the steering wheel, navigating themselves into tiny, unknown villages at 100kmh, Toot can barely get the thing the right way around.
We once ran a tour to Pamplona for the running of the bulls, arriving in France at Calais and working our way down the west coast. Aside from getting ourselves hopelessly lost in Cognac and having to reverse down a one way street the wrong way to get out, things had been going fine. canada goose outlet in usa That is, until the journey from San Sebastian to Pamps.
While I was down the back selling our passengers as many one Euro beers as I could persuade them to drink, Toot was trying to navigate us in to a campsite neither of canada goose store us had buy canada goose jacket ever been to. It was only when I glanced out the window in between passing Kronenbourgs around that I saw a road sign pointing us towards Madrid. I headed down to the front.
With that, we threw a U bolt in the middle of a two lane highway while I grabbed the mic and told everyone that we didn’t have far to go, so Canada Goose Parka they’d better get a few more cheap beers in.
But even that was favourable to the 15 hour extravaganza I canada goose outlet ended up on while trying to get from Venice to Lauterbrunnen in Switzerland. Thanks to widespread floods and landslides, my driver “Baa Baa” and I were forced to do almost an entire lap of Switzerland which would have been fine, as Switzerland’s lovely to look at. Except about 10 hours in, one of the passengers noticed smoke coming from the on board toilet. “Hey Ben,” this little Kiwi girl said. “I think the loo’s on fire.”
I reefed open the door to find that she was wrong the driver’s sleeper bin was on fire. A quick evacuation, a few squirts with the fire extinguisher, a unintelligable chat with the canada goose outlet store local police, and we were back on our way. With only five hours on a smelly bus canada goose outlet shop to go.
And of course, those two incidents happened on nice, clean, sanitised European buses, driving on nice, clean, canada goose uk outlet sanitised European roads. Anyone who’s taken local transport in a developing country will the know the joys of spending hours sharing space with various species of livestock, while wedged between locals with questionable standards of hygiene, as the driver attempts to break land speed records on pothole ridden dirt tracks.
Or sand tracks, in which you can get bogged. As I did in Namibia. In a truck.
But there are plenty of things that can go wrong on normal old car trips, too. The most common, of course, is getting lost, which, depending on the severity of the lostness and how long you’ve been cooped up in the car with your fellow travellers, can become a disaster. Dummies will be spat, toys will be thrown out of cots, and road trips will be cancelled.
Some will even end up walking.
But most of the time, you just have to put up with your passengers. I once had canada goose outlet online uk to drive home from a party in Colorado with a car full of my wasted mates, in heavy, driving snow. While they all fought each other for control of the stereo, screaming out, “Nah, play some canada goose outlet black friday Pink Floyd maaan!” I was sitting on 20kmh, my nose pressed to canada goose factory outlet the windscreen as the wipers battled the blizzard. We canada goose uk shop got home safe, somehow.
The worst thing that can happen, though, is mechanical failure, which, when you’re driving a rust bucket you managed to scrape a few coins together to purchase overseas, is almost inevitable. And it will probably happen in the middle of nowhere.
My old travel buddy Karl and I once got a flat tyre in uk canada goose outlet the middle canada goose outlet sale of a field in Scotland, and couldn’t for the life of us canada goose outlet online manage to unscrew the nuts to change the tyre. So we decided to call the boss of the farm we were working on for help.
“All right you little Aussie fockers!” he screamed into the phone. “If I git doon there, and get that tyre off, you fockers are on pigs fer a week!”
You can guess where we spent the next seven days.
Ever had a disastrous road trip? How did it all go wrong?
This week canada goose outlet we have a new competition on The Backpacker. Tell us your best/worst road trip story. Leave it in the comments section below, and be sure to include a valid email address in the appropriate field so we can get in touch with you. The best comment this week will win a Lonely Planet Bluelist 2008 plus a set of Lonely Planet Citiescape books.
Competition only open to Australian residents. The judge’s decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into. Entries must be received by Monday, March 3.
Hope you’re enjoying the Backpacker blog.
Posted by Ben Groundwater
in The Backpacker
at 9:35 AMIt’s a sometimes harsh fact of life like lost socks and late trains but the citizens of some countries are just better looking than that of others.
And while the prospect of aesthetically challenged locals canada goose outlet jackets shouldn’t discourage you from visiting a place, sometimes it’s nice to know where the beautiful people are.
After all, if you’re single, you https://www.dvu-nds.de want to maximise your chances of meeting a Misha Barton rather than a Magda Szubanski (or a George Clooney rather than a Jack Black, if that’s your preference).
Of course, this is a dangerous blog to write, as I’ve seen the kind of treatment people get cheap canada goose dished out to them for penning vacuous travel blogs. And as the pimply faced Canada Goose sale kid from The Simpsons would say: “If I had a girlfriend, she’d kill me.” (Which I do. And she will.)
(For pictorial representation, I’ve included pics of each country’s Miss Universe contestant. For the women, I apologise: I Googled “Mr Universe”, but all I got was bodybuilders.)
To begin, I’m going to go out on a limb and admit that I have always found our beloved colonial overlords, the English, fairly attractive (ignoring the royals). But apparently not all Australians agree, considering a website like Antipodate a dating site for Antipodeans in London looking to meet other Antipodeans has been set up. Seems we prefer our own rather than mixing with the natives.