First Trip

I had been in Australia but a few weeks when a friend from the UK, Rik , arrived in Sydney. He had just come from Melbourne where he was visiting his girlfriend. Before I had even left the UK, we had tentatively arranged a possible road trip in Oz for when I came out. Sure enough this all fell into place two weeks before Christmas, when yet another friend from the UK, Howard., arrived.

Our plan was to hire a car and head up the coast for a couple of weeks with our final destination to be Fraser Island. So with the car now hired, we left Sydney on Monday, December 13th and headed into the unknown. Rik would take the first shift driving, Howard would jump into the driver's seat three hours later, and I would follow after. We basically tagged teamed our way up the coast, stopping only for fuel. And so it was early Tuesday morning, on a very long stretch of road on the Pacific Highway, that the first of our adventures took place.

At this time, it happened to be that I was poodling along at 220kmh on a road with a speed limit of 100kmh. It was very early in the morning, no one was on the road and I was slowing down when a police car shot by in the other direction. I slowed dramatically after that to the speed limit, but as I was about to find out, I was a little too late. Yes, the rozzer did a u-turn and started bearing down on us with lights ablaze, but thankfully, no sirens. When I pulled over I was asked for my license and was told that I had been speeding (doh). My reply:

"Really officer, I had no idea."
"Yes sir, you were infact doing 167 kmh"
(Doh)

The officer, (a young man in his mid to late twenties), then went back to his squad car with my license in hand, and after what seemed like an agonizingly long wait, he came back out, handed me my license and said with a smile on his face,

"You're not going to like this."