Urban Crag Your Kangaroo Point Cliffs Rock Climbing specialists
Friday night’s alright (for fighting)
As soon as I realized that Mrs Bigfoot would be working on the KC weekend, I knew that I was in for some strife. For KC’08 last year, I took the car to pick Shane up from Clayfield and meet everyone at 8 Mile Plains, where we all drove down in the Tarago (which involved a difficult game of “car tetris” to fit everything in). This year, we’d decided to drive a second car down to Mudgeeraba, then transfer all of the gear to the Mystery Machine once the race had started. This year, my wife refused to let me take the car for the weekend.
Shane suggested that we use his car instead, which gave us 3 options:
- Shane could drive over to my place and pick me up at 4am, but it is generally a bad idea to have competitors in the driver’s seat, either before or after the race (since they are orders of magnitude more stressed and tired than the support crew). Also, by me driving to Shane’s place instead, it enables him to have an extra half hour of sleep.
- My wife could drive me over to Shane’s place so that I could pick up his car, either at 4am Saturday morning or alternatively on Friday night before the race. This option was not met with enthusiasm.
- I could catch the bus to Milton after work on Friday, then catch a train home with Shane so that I could pick up his car.
So, we went with option 3. I got to Shane’s place at about 6pm and we proceeded to load most of his gear into the car, which would save us some time in the morning. When he went to open the boot, however, Shane discovered that he hadn’t shut it properly the night before. When I went to drive off, the engine wouldn’t turn over – the light in the boot had been on for almost 24 hours, flattening the battery.
We waited almost an hour for RACQ to show up. His current battery dated back to 2005, so Shane opted to buy a brand new one. Guaranteed for 2 years, but all that I was worried about was the next 2 days!
When I got home, it was to begin another argument with She Who Must Be Obeyed: this time, over which car would be parked in the garage overnight. I didn’t relish the thought of going outside in the cold at 3am and then waiting 20-30min for the demister to melt all of the ice off the windshield. Instead, I spent 20-30min cleaning up the other half of our double garage so that both cars would fit. Ah, it’s a Sasquatch’s life.