the road trip –
Friday night and the swell has reached the north coast – this has been confirmed by a short phone call from a Sydney friend transplanted to the northern rivers – Time to go.
A man is lucky to have as many as three or four friends, as the saying goes ‘ If you can count all your friends on one hand you are a lucky man.’ Well you’re lucky tonight because two of them are going to be in your company for the time it takes to travel from Chatswood to Ballina. Happy Days.
Tomorrow brings the lucky dip where everyone wins, Flat Rock, Boulder, Lennox, Broken, Suffolk, Wategos, Byron, Brunswick – pleasure heaped upon pleasure and only about eight hours away.
How time will fly ..
The Music.
There is always one and he’s getting in the car. He has a AC/DC compilation in his hand as he climbs into the front of the car. He can do that, the front seat, because you have known each other for 38 years and it is so pleasurable to have such an old mate attempt to play the same wretched music every time he has the opportunity.
We’ll call him Bob. Three years ago we threw the CD out of the window before Hornsby and since then he has secreted many copies about his person. BeachBoy Bob, his dream is two foot Crescent for two weeks and somebody else cooking dinner every night, like in a restaurant.
Bob has a complete inflexibility when it comes to passing a McDonalds – He won’t allow it. Any disobedience in this respect and he retains his share of the running costs and puts his extremely ugly bare feet up onto the windscreen. Kate Moss sitting on the steering wheel and looking at you in the eye would be less of a distraction.
He is also the Irish lawyer in the outfit and he claims food is his personal running cost and as such must be shared. Bob eats often and magnificently. He also has great cunning in the water, an attribute his wife finds hard to believe – Bob being such a chap. Rugby as a youth and all.
Bob swears he was a regular at north narra onceuponatime but you ask anyone who is still alive and was there that century and it’s Bob who?
He is reminded of this on a regular basis.
The Conversation.
There are times in the affairs of men when a silence must be allowed to reign and under its favours a grander constellation of thought can be constructed, or travelled. This is in our nature. Surfers are deeply spiritual. It is however not in Dave’s nature, he is a noisemaker. Dave is friend number two.
Dave is sitting back there behind the driver. He has recently finished reading The Count of Monte Cristo – about 1,200 pages – and by his reckoning the eight hours in front of them tonight might just be enough time for him to get through the gist of the novel.
Nobody wants this. Dave’s endless recitations lose their fascination after about ten uninterrupted minutes and to silence him he has to be reminded of his absolute lack of talent in the surf and his reliance on somebody to tell him which way to go when he catches a wave. This is a real crowd-pleaser at North Avalon.
This year he wants a shot at Lennox and the longer the bastard talks the bigger the chance is that we will actually take him out there.
headpic by j abegg
petebowes.com 
Two of the saddest words on this road trip – Bob who?
But Pete, while on this road, I have to know – is that car still up the gum tree, (somewhere near Taree) on the left of the Pacific Hwy, that highway to heaven?
I think the tree fell over, but we have a better one just north of here – some car wrecker has an old car carcass lodged up on the verandah of his house – it’s a good look
I travelled with Bob south to Green Island once or twice; I can recall praying to God to make me deaf to save me from his music. Years later God heard my plea, now I’m deaf and Bob has a hearing aid, I live in fear of the next road trip with the man. You should be able hear us coming long before we get past the city limits.
Which one gets the gnarly gas attacks? There’s always at least one. It’s a rule.