Still slightly dialled up, but no longer in the whops

Today I have travelled around 400 kilometres in a 1961 plasticine/blue-tak blue Morris Minor. It has a zippy motor. I think my dad, who's a diesel mechanic when he's not saving the world by producing top class progeny of the female variety, may have put a different engine in it at some stage. It apparently reaches a maximum speed of 150kmph. Not that you'd ever know, cause on the open road the needle on the speedometer swings recklessly between 45 and 70 miles per hour. The car also comes equipped with air-con, the old-fashioned kind. And due to aforementioned excessive ventilation, it's loud. It's been a while, maybe 10 years or so, since I flew in this little four person airplane from Whitianga in the Coromandel to Great Barrier Island, but I think the Morrie produces a comparable level of noise for the comfort of its passengers. As in, you have to yell at the person sitting next to you to be heard. I had an hour or so of spanish lessons in this way. The only music we had available was the tape my stepmum had left in the player, Opera. That's as clear a picture of the music I can paint in my ignorance. Some lady and some guy with wasps in their vocal cords. Sometimes I like that kind of music, in a bubblebath with some candles and a glass of wine. But it was postively absurd listening to it compete with the drone coming from the Morrie as we buzzed along the southern motorway.

We managed to stay on the right side of the road, as in the left, with Kelly driving all but a few hundred metres of the voyage. I had a quick drive approaching Auckland sista's apartment complex and decided the Morrie was no fleecey seated Terrano that basically drives itself. I haven't driven the Morrie since it was newly bought and had no brakes. And it's been awhile since I've been acquainted with a gear stick. So I left my baby sister, seven years my junior, to struggle with the tiny metal accelator biting into her jandal the entire way. With characteristic lack of communication from my extremely blokey dad (he's walking around loading up his Caldina stationwagon this morning to trek south with us, with a flap swinging out of the ass of his stubbies flashing red undies), we were forced to do some pretty dodgy manouevring in Auckland traffic. Auckland is fairly multi-ethnic, whaddya call that, cosmopolitan maybe. And you tend to hear a lot of complaints about certain ethnicities lack of proficiency behind the wheel, usually not in very polite terms. At one point, when my sister and I, two little blonde-haired blue-eyed whities, were hanging out in a lane with a green light to go straight, waiting for the arrow for the right turning lane to go green so we could squeeze in, I looked back at the vehicle we would need to cut in front of that was being driven by a Pacific Island man, and said to Kelly, I bet you that guy is thinking, bloody honkey drivers.........She laughed.