The Breakdown

Every year we go camping at Xmas/New Years. It has been a Family tradition for My Beloved since he was a child ( quite possibly even longer). Usually it is the beach. But this year we all decided to camp at a dam so we could go water skiing and when I say we, I mean some of us. I am not one of them. I am pretty certain I would fall to my death or just fall and get some kind of injury ( I heard about ‘water enemas’ and that pretty much cured me as well!) The last thing I want to do is be camping and injured looking after small children. Oh good lord that would be pure hell, wouldn’t it!

The dam was roughly two hours from our home and after a night and day of warning the kids that we would not be going until they had tidied up and organised their wetsuits. They finally cottoned on to the seriousness of the matter and by 1.30 that afternoon we were on our way.


We stopped to gather some beverage supplies for our New Years Eve at the dam and that was when we got first hint of trouble. As My Beloved was loading an esky with ice and other goodies he received a phone call. His father had broken down and was stuck on the road halfway between us and the dam. To make matters worse it was in the middle of a no service area and he had to give a kind Samaritan our number and that of his daughter as well. They promised to continue calling those numbers until they spoke to someone and informed them of their whereabouts.

“We gotta go. Dads broken down and he is waiting for us in the middle of nowhere.” My
Beloved said to me as I pulled littlest Miss out of her car seat for a feed, she was unimpressed with the restriction of the car seat and it was getting quite hot.

”Oh, OK.” I said “just let me give bub a drink.”Not long after we set off and an hour later we reached the spot. By this time My Father in Law and My Step Mum in Law had been broken down on the side of the road for three hours.

I had been stuck behind a very slow moving car for twenty minutes with no way to over take and I was pretty cranky, I wont lie, had that driver been a fly on the ‘wall’ of my car they would have been slightly hurt by some of the comments I was muttering in their general direction! Littlest Miss had, by this stage, become completely over sitting still and had been crying and trying to get out of her seat for half and hour.




Once we pulled over the girls in  my car and I sat in comfort while everyone else suffered the heat of the day. The ‘men’ all stood around a cooked engine and scratched their heads and discussed what ever it is men discuss whilst standing around an open bonnet. Eventually we decided to meet everyone ( in the process of hooking up the cooked car to tow) in the nearest town, Kingaroy. We enjoyed shade and full mobile reception until they crept into town and left My Father in Law's car with a friend of his and despite his dreams of 'just going home' we all drove the further half and hour or so to the dam and our home for three days. It was not the end of car trouble for that holiday. Not by a long shot!...