Amanda, do you ever have a normal day?

That was what my friend said to me at dinner last night. Yes is the reply but they are kind of few and far between something always seems to happen to me. I'm chilling in bed right now the 4WD has a wheel almost off the axle, my ankle is swollen, my back is grazed, I'm covered in bruises. I let a spider crawl over my face, got attacked by a killer snake, walked/ran 3km in the middle of nowhere at 3am in the morning to find help signalling SOS with my torch….

Ok lets start from the beginning. It involves beer.

11pm I rolled home after a very long shift at the entertainment centre. I was taking my surfers out to Scott's creek to catch some crayfish for eating and a few snakes just for fun. Surfers I had, Leo again (brazillian german), Javier (columbia), Youngkey (US), Romana (Austria), Assia (Germany), Colleen (french), Endika (Spain), Mike (german), Ken (US), Alice (france), Philipp (German), Hogni (Faroe Islands).

Its an hours drive away so we didn't really arrive till super late. We set up the tents and got a nice fire going. There weren't any crayfish since someone had come and eaten them all but there were a large amount of snakes so we ran around catching them for a bit before getting bored (and I was cold from the water) so we sat around the fire drinking. Endika & Colleen were worried they hadn't locked the van so I said I would take them back. They had parked it just before the 4WD part. On the way back from the van I decided it was 3am and I would be stupid and go offroad, straight into some mud! Only to get the Hilux bogged so badly in some deep mud that it was never coming up. I left Endika & Colleen alone with the car and decided to walk / run back to the campsite to see if I could get some help. Anyway it turned out it was about 3km and it was so dark. I had my torch but I wanted to save the batteries so I just survived by moonlight.

Anyway after about 10 minutes of wandering around in the dark by myself I was getting paranoid like crazy. So that's when this fucking SNAKE decides to attack me. So I am screaming jumping around and this snake is following me everywhere. Anyway after a short while I suddenly turn on the torch to see it and its a bloody shoelace that got stuck on the velcro of my sandals. I’d just like to say in my defense, the three deadliest snakes in the world live in my backyard!

I get to the clearing just before the creek and decide whilst running to signal S.O.S with the flashlight hoping that someone will see me and perhaps drive up to me to save me running the last km. No such luck.. apparently they saw the flash of the torch but not the signal and just assumed we were finally coming back. So since we had been gone at least an hour I queried the lack of worry, shrugs all round!
So about 7 people pile into the other car and we head back to the 4WD where they attempt to push the car out of the mud. Nope no luck. Accepting defeat we all pile back into the car +another two. We headed back to the campsite. You ponder how we fit so many in the car? Lets just say three of us hung out in the boot (trunk) I decided to really drown my sorrows. I grabbed a beer out of the esky and then walked forward and promptly fell over the esky dropping my full beer everywhere and severely bruising myself. It was then as I was drunken stumbling to my self made bush toilet that I fell instead into a ditch and sprained my ankle. I lay in agony in the ditch for a good few minutes before crawling out and limping back over to the party.

Somewhere in the night I found a huntsman picking it up I put it on my shoulder but it soon decided to crawl over my face and onto my glasses where it sat quite comfortably & photogenically.



Huntsman are not deadly but they do hurt a little when they bite, if they bite.

The next morning I woke up and called my dad to come tow me out of the mud and chilled in the river with a beer whilst I waited. When he showed up about 10:30 he said "where did you get the car stuck." and I was like "off the left side into the mud" and he goes "well its fine. its on the road" I was dumbfounded and he took me to the car. It was sitting on the side of the road, handbrake on all the doors locked. Somewhere between 4 & 9am someone pulled my car out of the mud.

Eventually we left to go home I had Columbia on the front of the car so tried to hit as many bumps as possible - make it interesting you know. As we got out onto the main road & picked up the other cars we noticed the 4WD shaking, Philipp got underneath and said there was an alignment problem with the axis and being that he was a mechanical engineer I believed him.

Driving home at 50km/h we finally got back to reality 2.5 hours later. Most of us were exhausted, hot, dirty. We decided to head over to the free waterslides which are about a 10 minute walk from my house. Anyway I was going down the dual slide with Mike from Germany who is a big guy and we were going really fast when we hit the end, I just bounced – hit the side of the waterslide and went flying onto the ground scraping my elbow & back. Dazed I stood up signalling to the lifeguard I was ok. That was the end of my waterslide adventure.

In the end I was talking to my diesel mechanic friend Steve about the car and he straight away asked me if there was a lot of mud in the tyres. “Yes of course” I said. “Well wash all the mud out of the rims and try again” So I did exactly that and the hilux ran like a dream.

Go figure, so how was your day?