Today we were wearing tie-dyed coveralls and orange stakhats and the only comments we received were about our tyres. They are admittedly very nice tyres, but that gives you a reasonable idea of proclivities of our fellow shitboxers.

Today was a smooth ‘introductory’ day, mostly on sealed roads, 425km from Melbourne to Hay via Heathcote, Echuca and Deniliquin.

We’re getting to know our buddy group, the members of which all seem to have their eccentricities, as do we, I suppose. There seems to be a genuine interest in helping one another. For example, we mentioned the weird slow acceleration thing our new shitbox goes in for from time to time. A fellow driver sought to help:

“Does your transmission have a dip-stick?” he asked me

“Ah yes” I said “the gear lever? It’s just to the left of the steering wheel.”

He could have shamed me in front of my new colleagues, but did not. Instead he just popped our hood and had a look. Of course he was referring to a dip stick for our transmission fluid, to check our level, who knew that was a thing? Well, as it turns out we don’t have one, so the mystery remains.

The day went quite smoothly really; we lost one car very early and news of its demise travelled like a whisper on the breeze.

“An Astra, did you hear?”

“Ooh yes, the Astra. I heard it was a tyre, or the engine, or the transmission fluid. If only they had a dipstick.” Anyway, they weren’t in our buddy group and we never met them so it all still seems rather theoretical to us. Like a tragic flood in a country we’ve never heard of.

Otherwise, the number of bakeries in rural Australia is truly astonishing, evidence that a meat pie will survive any cost of living crisis. And they are so confident in their product they will unashamedly offer up ridiculous concoctions, like the ‘spaghetti pie’ we spotted in Echuca. Unfortunately it is so popular that they had sold out. An experience missed.

We made it to Hay before sunset and set up quickly for us, but objectively very slowly. Our swags are brand new so we had to drag them out of their original plastic – a classic way to identify yourself as a seasoned professional. Our swags contained these shrink wrapped mattresses that expanded like microwave popcorn as soon as we released them. They are, between them, now about the same size as our car. Not sure what we’re going to do about that tomorrow. We don’t have any means with which to re-shrink anything.

There are some truly spectacular set-ups around us however. One team across the way casually set up an almost full-sized basketball hoop, which emerged from their car somehow, and there were all manner of contraptions and home comforts disgorging from tiny vehicles in every direction – dudes playing darts over there, ladies wearing LED robes over here, and a fella sitting on his roof with an electric guitar.

We have already heard legendary tales about what happens over night at the ‘triage tent’; like a frankenstein’s laboratory that fuses 40 year old Corollas and battered Datsun Sunnies together in an unspeakable alchemy of rust and flame. It sat quietly this evening because the poor fallen Astra was either long gone or a myth all along.

Anyway, we hit the dirt tomorrow, so quite likely by the evening we will see smoke and steam begin to billow from the triage tent, like Mount Doom in the heart of Mordor.

Hay Showgrounds