National Lampoon's Vacation

Our annual Summer vacation is off to a shaky start. It’s taken us almost seven hours to travel a distance that normally takes four hours. Traffic crawled (I.e. stopped and started) for the first two hours out of Sydney as the thermometer soared above 43C. Traffic continued grinding to a halt after finally clearing the city thanks to an endless stream of overheated cars and fender benders.

Then, as we hit the highway, the cruise control went haywire and registered a radar fault (we’ve never had that happen before). We turned off the motorway to wash the car and hopefully reset its radar sensors.

However, as we drove into the automated car wash machine it suddenly stopped and a fatal system error flashed on the activation screen. With cars queued behind us we were trapped inside until the staff came to our rescue. Fortunately, our delayed car wash did successfully fixed the cruise control.

My iPhone then decided to have a meltdown. It started dropping calls, stopped connecting to the network, froze mid-search, and threw up blank screens. Multiple resets over 45 minutes eventually resolved the issue and Google Maps was back in action.

We finally reached our riverside hotel, a scenic overnight pitstop, shortly after 7pm only to find reception closed. They’d left keycards for our room. However, neither card worked in the door. Multiple dropped calls to an after hours number finally resulted in a staff member arriving to let us into our room.

Given such a hectic day we headed for the local pub to enjoy a quiet drink and a bite to eat. As we walked in the staff kindly advised us of a 90 minute wait for food. We sat outside and consoled ourselves with a cold beer only to have a passing shower curtail our efforts.

We’re hoping tomorrow’s drive to our final destination doesn’t follow in the footsteps of that classic movie, National Lampoon's Vacation. It’s spawned at least five sequels. As we wait for our meals, we’re finally decompressing thanks to a truly spectacular sunset over the Harrington River. It’s a wonderful deja vu moment as this post will testify.

UPDATE: 28 December

Delighted to report today’s four hour drive was 100 percent incident free. Along the way we stopped for wander along the headlands at Tacking Point. This evening we’re enjoying a cold beer overlooking the Clarence River in Yamba.

UPDATE: 30 December

I forgot to mention that our day was already off to a rocky start on 27 December before we’d even left home. We discovered flies had been through the kitchen garbage bin overnight. As a result, we were greeted by maggots crawling through the kitchen on the morning of our departure. We spent an hour clearing the infestation before finally packing our bags.