Filling in the gaps - USA visit No. 2

Having gone through the various things that were packed in the back of the pickup, I found that there were boxes there which didn't belong to me. And, of course, I had to make sure that all of my stuff was there. And complain bitterly about the smashed rear window belonging to Glendon,

The slightly different route to follow this time:

He'd been hunting high and low for that window for some time, I had packed it well and had it on top of the pile with 'Glass with care' type notes written all over it, but still they managed to destroy it.

Anyway, I soon hit the road, fuelled up and pointed the nose of the truck in the direction of the Putty Road. And as soon as I got onto that road I found there was some kind of car club run happening with big old American cars coming the other way...

Interesting traffic. Obviously some sort of club run was on and cars like this old Cadillac started to file by.

So I pulled up to watch them go by. This was just outside of Windsor on the section of road where people grow turf for a living... the Adventurer a bit out of place on this side of the road:

Pulled up. My first chance to take a pic of the Adventurer in Australia, by the turf farms out of Windsor.

This Packard was one of the cars which went by...

Packard Clipper. A 1946 Packard Clipper silently makes its way amid everyday traffic.

I missed out on most of the cars because they'd gone through while I was in heavier traffic. And I needed to keep rolling. It started to rain and as I got into the more serious stretch of the Putty road I was on wet tarmac.

Just to explain, the Putty Road runs out of the North-Western outer suburbs of Sydney through mountainous sandstone territory to Singleton, in the Hunter Valley. A hundred miles long, it carries very little traffic and after the first twenty miles or so is inhabited by very few people. It used to be used commonly by truckies in a hurry, but the advent of freeways nearer the coast has cut that usage down.

A couple of sections have tight corners as they follow creeks in ascents and descents, but there's some long-ish straighter sections too. It's become very popular with motorcyclists in the past couple of decades and more recently that's led to lowering of the speed limit in places so the police can keep them broke.

I pulled up to take this photo:

Wet Putty Road. Realising I hadn’t taken many photos of the pickup, I pulled up to get a few here.

After trundling through the Upper Hunter and going over that Murrurundi Hill where the train had gone through the tunnel, I passed through Tamworth and visited a friend briefly, then it was on to Manilla, where I was able to arrange a rare meeting with a good young friend of mine, Marc.

Marc owns a prime mover and has a job delivering bulk cement, lime, fly ash and suchlike things all over New South Wales. He never knows where he's going from one day to the next so it was good to catch him on this trip at a truck stop.

Marc at work. It was convenient to pull up here and meet up with Marc and his Freightliner.

Also at Manilla I called in to the workshop where this De Soto lives and got a pic of my Adventurer alongside of it. I chose this road for the trip home because it carries minimal traffic and therefore the problems of driving on the left side of the road with Left Hand Drive are reduced. So every trip home with one of my American acquisitions I call in here.

Older cousin. Wearing De Soto badges, this one was over twenty years older than mine.

The next port of call was at Bundarra, or outside of Bundarra. Dave, an old friend of mine, had a 4,000 acre farm there which was in quite rough country. I was romping along quite well with the Adventurer on my way to his place, keeping up a very good clip on an almost-deserted road, and had not long passed a woman in a small white car when, in the middle of a long fast curve, one of the tyres blew out...

Flat tyre. A good thing I’d taken a jack with me! This didn’t hold me up for long.

I rode it out and pulled up to a stop. The woman came alongside and said to me, "Your washerwoman will know about that one!" I assured her it was no trouble, then she insisted on knowing where I was going because she thought I was in trouble. I tried to tell her I was okay, but I did tell her I was heading to Dave's place. She phoned Dave and told him I was in strife!

As you can see here, the jack I'd taken as luggage on the train trip came in handy.

Ten miles later, just a mile from Dave's gateway, I passed Dave as he was rushing out to help me in his Landcruiser.

Next came Gilgai, where a big windstorm had just gone through and where I visited my cousin Graham...

Gusty Gilgai. Trees were ripped out by the roots here when a big wind came through.

...and on to Tenterfield, where my car was parked. I had arranged with a friend to drive me back there once I’d taken my car home and then I completed the trip in the pickup.

I emptied most of my load out at a storage shed at The Summit, I have and then dropped around to visit Sue, the widow of an old Mopar-loving friend not far from home. There were a couple of transmissions to drop off there, this is at her place:

Empty and almost home! The last of the load was dropped off here at Sue’s place.

The Adventurer has ever since been kept quietly at home or in that storage shed, but one day an old friend, Max Stahl, came by and I suggested he'd like to take a bit of a run up and down the drive in it...

Max takes a drive. Just up and down the driveway, but still a chance to sample the Mopar machine.

...which he did. He had a good smile over that...

Max at the wheel. Expressing himself here, Max had problems coming in his life.

It's hard to believe that just four years later he was almost incapacitated and he hadn't driven for about three years.

Now that the pickup was at home with me, this particular adventure was over. The van, however, was still in Spokane and I started planning my next trip to use it again and bring it home too. And this time I would include Europe in the 'adventure'...

There's a number of things to take care of when importing a vehicle for use on Australian roads. First, there's the application to the Department of Infrastructure (or something like that) for permission, which will require a copy (in this case) of the Certificate of Title. The vehicle is not allowed to be shipped unless they have this certificate, if it's shipped then it's not allowed to land here and is sent straight back. At the owner’s expense.

But it's really a relatively easy process and doesn't take long, maybe two weeks or so. Then that approval information has to be forwarded to the shipping people. They arrange containerisation and schedule it as soon as they can arrange, when it gets onto a ship it's about a month before it reaches our shores.

Import approval granted. Almost a formality, but without this the pickup couldn’t come to Australia.

In this case it took several weeks to find an available container for some reason, which was frustrating but it did give me extra time to save up the money for the shipping and other importing costs.

Once here all vehicles must be steam cleaned and checked by quarantine people. Since the asbestos problems of a couple of years ago, they also need to be pretty sure there's no asbestos anywhere in the vehicle so it's a wise move to change the brake pads and clutch plate and show them proof you've put in new ones. But my importation was prior to this issue, I didn't have to worry about that.

To make a US-built vehicle usable on Australian roads it must comply with the rules that applied here at the date it was built there. No matter what, the following must be done:

New safety belts which carry labels stating they comply with Australian rules. Some EU compliance is accepted.

Brake lights must work on a minimum of two rear lights.
Turn signals must be amber all round.
Parking lights (at the front) must be white.

Conversion to Right Hand Drive is necessary with cars not yet thirty years old. And all of this is in addition to the need for the vehicle to be completely roadworthy. But none of this is required to enable the vehicle to be driven temporarily on a one-way trip basis. Other than the applicant must declare it to be basically roadworthy.

It's under that last umbrella that I went to Sydney in March, 2015 and signed a declaration that it was roadworthy and paid the fee for a trip from there to Dalveen in Queensland.

To get there I was going to hitch-hike. I like this method of 'transport' but others around me felt it wasn't safe and so I pandered to them and bought a train ticket from Tenterfield to Sydney. I then drove my car the 50 miles (we'd say 80kms) to Tenterfield early in the morning and parked it there to await my return. Along with me I took a few things that I could need, among them a jack in case I struck trouble. At Tenterfield I boarded a bus which has taken over from trains quite a number of years ago...

Bus to Armidale. On routes where trains once ran regular passenger services, but now don’t, coaches are employed to provide the service.

...and which got me to Armidale station where the train awaited us:

Train from Armidale Inter-city trains are small these days, sleek and fairly rapid as well as comfortable.

One thing about train travel, even if the railway is close to the highway, you see different scenery to what you've seen dozens or hundreds of times travelling in the car. And you're more inclined to see backyards than front yards.

Backyards, front yards. There’s always something different about the view from the train rather than the highway.

The view always seems different in many ways...

Altogether different. Whether it be just the other side of the hill or something spectacular, it’s always different.

...and when you get into stations the buildings seem to be very old. At least they do here...

Willow Tree station. At the junction of two major lines, it needed to be a substantial building in times past.

On this trip the small train became larger when we stopped at a place called Willow Tree. The train from Moree came in and was joined onto ours for the trip to Sydney.

The train grows larger. The train from Moree comes in to be joined onto our train.

And there was plenty of interest in watching the trains join up for the remaining 300kms of the trip.

Coupling. These will simply slip together and the trains are joined. Air lines etc have to be hooked up too.

Around that area there was some cultivation going on as the hills stood by in the background...

Fields and mountains. Some fields are cultivated, some are unused or for grazing, the hills look down on it all.

...and people were at work, some of whom we impeded in their jobs as we got rolling again...

Impeded. We all know what it’s like to sit at a level crossing and wait for the train to go by…

As we were about to cross the Great Dividing Range between Willow Tree and Murrurindi we looked over a local road and the beginning of the climb the New England Highway takes to cross the range. We, of course, went through a tunnel:

Highway climbs. A minor road is closer to the train, the New England Highway is seen here approaching its steep climb over the Liverpool Range.

Murrurundi in view...

Murrurundi. The last town in the Upper Hunter Valley, a small but busy town.

...as we pass by prosperous farms in this racehorse-breeding area. Note the old house in the foreground to the right:

Prosperity and ruin. When properties change hands here they attract big money, but they’re not immune to having a past not so rich.

Country town Australia, like the US, has all sorts of backyards. There's a dam in this one, probably they keep some animals there...

Country town backyard. A bigger backyard, to be sure, but the dam is certainly you wouldn’t see in a city backyard.

I think I said the view from the train is different, on the road you don't often see people come to see off their friends:

Seeing someone off. You can only wonder who this woman has accompanied to the station…

More men at work, a hefty machine travels the highway behind a Kenworth:

Oversize load. With the ‘dolly’ (between the prime mover and the trailer) in use it’s clear this load is pretty heavy.

Newcastle, the largest city before Sydney, has a suburban sprawl and some of it looks like this:

Suburbia. Small building blocks, homes from the 1940s and ‘50s as we near the inner part of Newcastle…

At the stations there are lots of cars parked by the commuters, of course...

And commuter parking. …where parking is difficult and some commuter parking has been excised from railways land.

...and various people, standing, waiting or walking somewhere...

Typical scene. Not the rush hour, people casually going about their business.

...while I travelled with people of different types. The wearing of this garb has caused a lot of division in Australia:

Multi-cultural Australia. With migration from so many lands, this covering is not uncommon.

The railway runs along the edge of Broken Bay, just North of Sydney, the sandstone territory isn't home to many...

Living on the water’s edge. Broken Bay’s inlets have given homes to some, particularly those who like fishing.

...but some grow oysters in these inlets off the bay.

Oyster farming. This is a common sight in the bay as ‘oyster leases’ provide some families with income.

The bay is the outlet of the Hawkesbury River, which rises (as the Nepean River) in the Blue Mountains and carves a circle right around the Sydney basin. Silt buildup in the bay is very deep and the first bridge to carry the railway over it had shaky foundations as they didn't reach bedrock. In the late '30s that bridge was slated for replacement and, while trains were limited to 10mph or something during the early part of the war, a new bridge was built alongside. We went past the relics that showed where it had been:

A relic. All that is left to remind us that an earlier bridge existed are the pylons and the old approaches at either end.

Once I reached Sydney I got onto a suburban train, these are all double-decked these days.

Glistening and modern. Double-decked suburban carriages have been in use for fifty years, but the newer ones are quite sleek.

I went from there to a friend's place so they could drive me out to the depot where the container had been unloaded and my truck emptied and checked over, the steam cleaning done etc.

Oh, yeah, and where I was to learn that the shippers had loaded even more stuff on top of my load despite me having put “Glass with care!” on the box on top!

Ultimately the flight got me to Brisbane, but we naturally lost a day somewhere out over the Pacific, and then I struggled to get my bags to the railway station for the train to the Gold Coast. Ben picked me up from the station in my car, still with the window at half mast after the winder failed on the way down nine weeks earlier.

My first job was to visit my mum in the nursing home at Mudgeeraba on the Gold Coast…

Rail and Road. From Brisbane Airport to Robina by train, then by road to visit my mother and then head for home.

… Once again I had not told her of the trip so she wouldn't imagine I was in every plane crash she heard about on the news or shooting reported from the US. Mum also told me my brother had had a heart attack. I phoned him right away and learned that it wasn’t a heart attack, but he’d had an operation to put a pig’s valve into his heart.

Mum In the nursing home she was well looked-after, but I’m sure she wondered when I’d be in touch again. She would turn turn 90 a few days later.

While it was great telling mum all about the trip and especially the things she would have enjoyed, I had the issue of the Forester's window to deal with. I went to a wrecker's and bought the mechanism that works it, then I went to another and bought another set of switches. Somewhere along the way it came good.

Which was a good thing, as it was now mid-winter. I had left some winter clothing in the car for this purpose and I would be heading to a home in the coldest part of Queensland before the day was over. Along the way I snapped a shot of one of a local panorama…

Gap view. Leaving the coastal strip and heading for home, this panorama over Aratula and Boonah was spoiled by the smoke from the winter burning-off which is done to lessen bushfire risks in summer.

Of course there was a lot of phone calls to make, letting people know I was back and making sure that my work for the coming weekend was sorted out.

Home that night was lonely and cold. The hot water heaters had to be brought up to speed and I had to start unpacking, look around at my work situation and put the fresh food I'd bought on the way home into the refrigerator and cook something to eat.

Before long, life would once again become normal. Sunrise at Dalveen…

Dalveen sunrise. Looking to the East over the laundry and water tank, I was back to the home I loved.

…every day I wasn’t away for work, my quiet life living alone in that big house with a couple of trips to town each week to meet up with friends, working on my cars, getting paperwork for the importation of the pickup sorted out.

Sunsets too. The passing of the days was sometimes good, often with heavy thoughts of the one with whom I’d once enjoyed these sights.]/i]

And for something less-often seen, the light on this occasion played tricks with the moisture in the atmosphere:

And a rainbow.[i] This rainbow looks to be falling into the trees down in the gully behind the house. The dry grass in the foreground is so different to what I’d seen in much of America.

The laptop was set up in the lounge room and I hooked it up to my NBN satellite service and all those other things I do all the time. Like drive down through the ranges to work of a weekend…

Killarney Road. A brisk drive each weekend often saw me enjoying views like this.

Until the next time I would take on another adventure across the seas…

Leaving Peter's place the next day I headed off on the relatively short drive to Long Beach…

Along the way I went past those nuclear power plants again and drove over some very tired concrete roads. It sure is busy in California, I don’t see that they can ever block off enough traffic to get the roadworks that are needed done.

The two important things to do were to put the pickup and its load into the shipping company so it could make its way to Sydney in a container; and to get myself to the airport in time to catch the Qantas flight to Brisbane.

Also along the way I took some pics:

Orange trucks. I took these for my friend Kevin McIntyre, the two different trucking company logos use the same style of black road with white centreline, all on an orange background, as his K-Mac suspension logo has been using for years.

New Day Thrift. Being keen ‘thrift shop’ frequenters, this van in Huntington Beach was worth a shot.

Loaded RAM. A modern pickup with the stakes and boards, not to mention a very heavy load, was not such a common sight.

Strange names. In Anaheim, the name of this takeaway meant nothing…

Crazy chicken. ...but this one means ‘The Crazy Chicken’ and was just across the road.

But there was more, of course. A little shopping, finding meals to get me through the day, sorting the things I was taking with me on the 'plane and the things which would remain in the truck. And throwing out some rubbish, always a job to be done at this stage. Unfinished packets of snack food, wrapping from take-aways, the stuff that doesn't manage to get chucked out along the road.

When the time came for me to bid the people at the shipping company goodbye and entrust them with my valuable pickup, the cab which came in response to their phone call on my behalf turned out to be yet another Dodge…

My cab. Another ride in a Dodge, this one would get me to the airport.

A slick ride to LAX and then it was the old routine of inspections and weighings and waiting and queueing and watching as people had to toss out things they shouldn't have. Bottles of water are always the most common.

Obviously I had made up my mind that I would be back again one day. The van in Spokane had to ultimately do another trip so I could ship it to Australia, there would be no changing that plan. I knew there were more sights to see, things I wasn’t used to…

Just a truck. But, once again, one like we never see in Australia. So many things like this had caught my eye and this one did on the way to the airport.

But as I mingled with people getting onto my flight and other flights and talked to them about their adventures and my adventures I had no firm idea when I might be back.

Remembering that the original purpose of this trip had been to cross the US, fly to Europe and have a tour through several countries there, then to return to the US and drive back across, this was still an ambition I held. But once again the trip had gone beyond my expectations, covering 14,400 miles in the van and 1,700 miles in the pickup, a total of 16,100 miles in nine weeks.

I made several phone calls to people in the US as I waited too. The phone still had unlimited calls on it. And the time passed. Aircraft came and went, flights were called on the public address and then ours was called. Gradually the 747 filled and we were ready to fly off into the night across the biggest ocean in the world.

747 at LAX. The giant form of a Qantas 747 like this one would take me through the night skies as I thought back about the adventure I’d had.(Ro Agher)

What a great time I had enjoyed, driving through 39 states of the USA, entering eight provinces of Canada, meeting so many of the people I have periodic contact with on the internet for the first time. And reaffirming friendships which had been formed on the first trip.

I strapped myself into my seat and about fourteen hours later I would be in Brisbane.

Of course, even in Brisbane the trip wasn't over...

Waking early on July 15, I drove on into the Northern parts of San Diego and found a McDonalds where I could have breakfast. I waited until it was a 'decent hour' to phone Peter and we arranged for me to drive around to his place and park out front. Not much travelling this day, nor on such a personal day did I take many pics…

Did he ever get a surprise when he saw what I was driving!

His place is on a pretty decent hill and I had to park carefully with the heavily overladen pickup to be sure it wouldn't go anywhere without my consent.

Hours were spent catching up with the years since we'd been such close friends. We went for a little drive to get some things and had lunch out, then he suggested we watch a DVD back at his place. "Have you seen 'The World's Fastest Indian,'" he asked.

The movie. A very funny movie with a lot of good factual inclusions as it tells the true story of New Zealander Burt Munro’s crack at Bonneville’s salt flats with a 1920 Indian he modified himself.

I had to admit that I hadn't. This was a movie I had been very keen to see at the cinema when it was new, almost a decade earlier. I recall interviewing hunrdeds of people who'd seen it during that time, people of all ages and backgrounds, women as well as men, and they all loved it. But I wanted to go see it with Janet on the big screen and we just never got it arranged.

Now I was going to watch it in Peter's living room and it didn't disappoint. Plenty of laughs, plenty of deep understanding of what was going on. Not to mention the fact that I was supposed to have been out there watching the cars on the salt flats shown in the film just a week earlier!

Peter’s home is in a quiet cul-de-sac surrounded by nice neat houses – and some gum trees. Like this place pictured by Google Earth Street View:

Gum trees flourishing. The trees each side of this home are growing greener and much more leafy than they would in Australia, where they’d get less water.(GE)

Peter told me that the trees are causing lots of problems because of their habit of dropping branches and collapsing in windstorms, especially the damage they cause falling on houses. But they grow easily in this habitat…

Growing everywhere. Another Street View picture shows a number of gum trees growing wild in a part of San Diego’s suburban landscape.

They largely made it to California as seeds carried by men chasing gold in the rush of the 1850s, now they are in plague proportions and a menace.

We also had a bit of a discussion when he took me out to lunch about the ugliest cars about. I was convinced that the Ford Flex couldn't be bettered when it came to looking the worst. "It's not in the race," said Peter, "The Kia Soul is way uglier!" Later we saw one and I got a (blurry) pic. I think he won that debate.

Kia Soul. This pic is not my blurry one, but the same angle as I took, the front is overly-busy and ugly too.

And so the day wore out and I spent the night there. In the morning I would be off to Long Beach to put the pickup in at the shipping company and then get a cab to the airport. This trip would then slip into history…