Sunday 18 November 2012

Day 323: Slow Trip Home


I made the decision this morning to tow the car home and after a little research I was able to find a ute and car trailer to hire at pretty short notice. The catch was that I'd have to bring the ute & trailer back tomorrow, no one would do a one way hire.

We were very fortunate that Belinda's parents didn't need their second car for a few weeks so Belinda was able to take the kids home in that while I fiddled about with getting organised to tow the BMW home. It was a fair bit of a palaver that consisted of picking up the ute & the trailer at separate locations and then loading the car up, tying it down with some ratchet straps that I conveniently had in the boot and then finally getting going.

The whole exercise saw me not getting on the road until after 5pm which should have had me home by around 8:30 allowing for a bit of a break. Unfortunately this wasn't the case either. Towing the car through the suburbs of Western Sydney was fine, a little sluggish with the turbo lag on the diesel ute, but still it was ok once it got going. The trouble started when I hit the highway. The trailer didn't tow so well with the car on it, it got the wobbles up as soon as got close to 90 km/h which is very disconcerting. What was even more disconcerting was not being able to control the wobbles and doing a 180 degree spin on the M7. I managed to stop the trailer from jack knifing and once the spin had stopped I was able to get both the ute and trailer that were facing the wrong way off the M7 quickly enough to avoid creating a massive traffic jam.

After taking a minute or two to calm down, I turned the ute around on the median strip and found gap in the traffic big enough to get going again. I couldn't travel at more than 80 km/h for the rest of the trip, as soon as I dared to venture above that I could feel the trailer starting to wobble again. In the end I made it home without further incident but it was close to 10pm by the time I got there.

This was by far the slowest trip from Sydney to Canberra I've endured and at the same time the most hair raising.

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