Friday night, race home from work, get changed, pack the bags, jump in the car and go.
Cold, dark, and Friday. What more do you need to create mayhem in the traffic? Sure enough, one or two people had driven into each other somewhere along the tollway, traffic was at a crawl from Toorak road all the way to the tunnel, through the tunnel and most of the way to the Westgate bridge. One lane of the tunnel closed — as usual. Ten percent of the motorists ignoring the lane closure — as usual.
Off down the Geelong road in thick fog. Everyone slowing to 75-80km/hr — everyone except the semi-trailer drivers that is, thundering past in near-zero visibility at 100km/hr. That’d be how a friend of mine nearly lost his life — hit from behind in the fog by a semi-trailer whose driver “knew the road”.
The temperature hovered around 5 °C most of the way from Melbourne to Lorne, dropping to 2.5 °C as we neared Torquay, I was amazed that it could be this cold so early in the evening, this near the coast, this early in the winter.
