Return to Sydney

For a change the kids behave beautifully the whole day despite the journey taking 11 hours. We make pit stops @ halfway Holbrook for lunch, including a bottle of Bobbie Burns Shiraz and at McDonalds where the waiter is astonished to learn that we don’t want to eat but simply want to purchase a fairy and a wizard for a dollar a piece. The next couple of days in Dulwich Hill are spent trying to sort out the car.

Poor old Percy has to go and nobody seems to want him. Not even the most understanding of second –hand car dealers on the Parramatta Road will offer more than $2000 so we switch to our back-up plan of selling back to Traveller’s Autobahn for 40% of the original selling price of $5500 ie $2200. When I finally track down the Sydney office, I come up against a real pr*ck whose ‘raison d’être’ is to stitch people up for a living. The offer price goes down $150 for an obligatory service after 10,000K, which we were prepared for. It then goes down another $200 for bringing the car back to a different office (fair enough – it’s in the smallprint). Things start to get nasty when he wants to knock off another $350 for fixing the brakes. True the brakes are sh*t, but they weren’t great when we bought the car and anyway it’s under warranty. After an hour of this guy saying he’s trying to get hold of his manager and the Cairn’s office who are on holiday/lunch respectively I decide to call them myself and miraculously I’m grudgingly given a revised offer of $1850. I manage to inadvertently run off with the key too which tickles my sense of humour imagining the panic of the guy with no spare set even in Cairns. I eventually decide to hand it in to Traveller’s Autobahn’s bank whilst I’m cashing their cheque but I was tempted not to.