A new Secret Skill

Sunday, 23 May 2021

Jon and I both have secret skills.  As previously mentioned on this blog, Jon has an uncanny ability to find gold when gold panning, and he's also surprisingly good at decorating gingerbread houses. My secret skill is paddling and um.. I dunno - I think I used to say cake making but it's probably caramel slice making now. It's certainly not remembering what my secret skills are as I'm sure I have more.

Anyway - I've decided Jon and I also have a combined secret skill... creating car windows from found items.  In fact if we ever find ourselves in any sort of multidiscipline adventure race where one leg requires you to fashion a car window before driving somewhere - we'd smash it - we've had so much practise.

In fact the one we did today was our forth window since 2017 - we used 3 map bags and our trusty gaffer tape (which we have left in the car since our first rodeo). 

I know what you are wondering.. who on earth is so irresponsible that they manage to smash 4 car windows? Well the only recurring trouble we've had with our 2011 Peugeot is that every now and again - typically when we are a long way away from home - someone puts a window up or down and there's a sudden crunching sound. The next thing we know the window disappears down into the door with a massive clunk, followed by a sickening feeling in our stomachs as we calculate how far we are from home. It's now happened to all 4 windows.

The first time this happened (our rookie year) was when we were in Devonport for orienteering - 3.5 hours from home, but 10 minutes from a Bunnings store where we got tape, scissors and plastic. The 2nd time was in the car park at Cradle Mountain - 4 hours from home,  the 3rd time was conveniently in Kingston and the 4th time was today, in a paddock near Royal George - 2.5 hours away from home. 

The particularly annoying thing about this particular occurrence was that I had a feeling it was going to happen - when I drove into Centrepoint Carpark on Friday Morning the window made a sick sounding noise as I raised it after taking the parking ticket. When I left the carpark in the afternoon I didn't want to risk disaster so I opened the door and leaned out of it like a fool in order to put my parking ticket into the machine. When I got home I let Jon know that we had to avoid opening that window until AFTER the weekend and our big trip to Royal George.

And Jon remembered this.  It's just that he forgot about the weirdest feature of our car remote - if you hold down the unlock button for too long, the car lowers all 4 windows at once.  I'm not sure why anyone would want this, and we never intentionally use it, but we do occasionally forget about it, or try too hard to unlock the car, and it happens. I don't think either of us have triggered this for more than a year but of course today was the day that it would happen!

 Luckily we're now experts, and with the minimum of fuss and the maximum of teamwork we taped ourselves up, I put on my headphones, turned up the volume on my podcast and we drove home with no further issues.