I suppose that some of you may have noticed that I haven’t been as active, posting and commenting, of late and there may be a few of you that think that I’ve probably just run out of things to say. There may even be a few of you who think that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew by picking a Halloween theme. After all, what would an Aussie know about the age old American tradition of Halloween?

Well, let me tell you, the only reason I’ve been missing from the blogging scene are personal ones. Nothing dramatic mind you, but enough to take me away from my passion of blogging.

One of the many things that has happened to me of late could almost be called the Horror Trip To Melbourne. A fitting title for a Halloween post wouldn’t you say?

My daughter has been bugging me to buy her a car for ages, telling me about all these fantastic cars that she’s found on the Net. Well, it just so happens that one of those cars was a really great buy. The only problem was it was in Melbourne, an 8 hour drive.

The wife and I decided we would fly out Friday night and drive back Saturday. Things went bad almost from the beginning. It started with almost missing our flight, although it was funny seeing the wife running and leaving her in my wake as I tried to hold up the flight.

The flight itself wasn’t bad, I didn’t get the urge to throw up or anything. After landing we took a taxi to the Crown Casino to have a look around. All in all it was quite pleasant. The motel we spent the night in wasn’t all that crash hot. It was as seedy as all hell and I’m sure the wife was happy to wake up in one piece, especially as most of the locks on the door were missing.

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So, first thing Saturday morning we caught a cab to pick up the car, a BMW 316I. You could almost say things went wrong from the moment I handed over the check. It had the wrong name on it, and being the weekend I couldn’t get another one issued.

No worries, I thought, I would EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer) the cash over, but I couldn’t remember the bloody password. Shit! I know, all I had to do was call the brother and get the password, to his account. Shit, it wouldn’t allow an amount of $8000 to be transferred. Try $4000! Yeah, that worked, now try another $4000. Nope. Hang on a sec, it’s not our account that’s the problem, it’s theirs. It won’t allow any more to be transferred into it. What’s with that anyway?

Once we worked that out we transferred the other $4000 into another account. That sorted out, we took possession of the car and headed for home. Once on the highway I took her to 150 kph and she was as smooth as. Pickup was fine, gear changes so smooth it wasn’t noticeable. Oncoming traffic caused me to reduce my speed to the 110kph limit, but that was fine as I was happy with the car’s performance, when all of a sudden the temp gauge went way over to the red. I immediately pulled over.

As I was slowing down the temp went back to normal and I figured it was only a minor glitch so I started to slowly accelerate again, but when the temperature started to rise I pulled over and called the RAA. I was put through to the RACV, the Melbourne counterpart.

“Excuse me sir, could you tell us your approximate location?”

“Well, I’m heading out of Melbourne on the Western Highway, and the last sign I passed said I was about 40k’s from Ballarat”

“Are there any distinguishing landmarks sir?”

“No, I’m in the middle of nowhere.”

“We are trying to approximate your position, can you tell me if you passed…” she gives me an indistinct name I no longer remember. I look to my wife in the hope I could will the correct response from her. No luck. Shit who looks at road signs when they have a GPS anyway?

To cut a long story short, after having three cars looking out for us, they located us and towed us to Ballun. Unfortunately they couldn’t fix the car as no parts could be found on the weekend, and I had to be back by Sunday. The wife was pretty stressed by then and tearing up. I tried to console her, telling her that everything would be alright. Shit the worst that could happen would be we lose the car completely and it would only take me about 40 years of Adsense earnings to make it up.

We caught a cab to the airport, and $145 later we’re trying to book a flight home to Adelaide, when…..

“I’m sorry sir, but the system is not accepting your credit card.”

As if enough things haven’t gone wrong, my credit card had to be maxed out. At least my debit card was working. We got those tickets and got out of that hell hole. I was almost about to spew up on the plane when it landed.

The end of my horror story.

OK, to reward you for putting up with that story, and because we are celebrating Halloween and all, I present to you this great little video, Tim Burtons “Vincent. I would have never found this video if hadn’t been for Stefan, one of my esteemed commentators, who has a brilliant post on how to automatically back up your computer.

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