Mick

December 16

Well today was an interesting day, and let me start with that. It started by Chris and I navigating back from the edge of the river to the main road in Redclifs. And that is where the "stuff" comes in. Well we hit the road after 5 minutes off roading, and pulled over beside a cashew field, due to the fact that I was hearing weird noises from the car, we popped the hood and discovered that......the fan belt had jumped off of the main drive, I was trying to figure out how to best fix it when a guy in a Yute stopped by and asked if we needed any help, luckily I said yes. It turns out this guy, Mick, is a mechanic, and he was able to diagnose the problem, it was the harmonic balancer that went, throwing the main drive pulley for the fan belt out of alignment, making the belt jump off. Once we got it back to his shop, and had a closer look at the balancer we found out that the seal to the crank case went covered the rubber balancer with oil, (which would explain why we went through 4 liters of oil in 4,00km) causing the pulley on it to slip. Mick had to run for parts for another car he was working on, in the meantime he pointed to the tools on the bench and said whatever we wanted to do ourselves would be fine, and everything else he would finish. He pointed to his house and told us we were welcome to use the tv room and have a shower if we got to oiled and stuff. If you have ever worked on a car like mine, you would know that we have to do some major work, with respect to the fact that we needed to get as far in as pulling the timing belt, which was handy, because I wanted to replace that anyway. So while Mick went for parts Chris and I attacked the car, we pulled the radiator, the air conditioner, the fan, the skid plate, and finally the timing belt cover finally came off. With the help of Mick, we pulled the balancer off, and ran into our fist big snag, there was a gear on the timing belt between us and the busted seal, that we couldn't get off, we also found out that the balancer and the timing belt had to be ordered in and wouldn't be in until 10:00 the next morning. So since we couldn't do anything more we sat down and cooked some supper on his BBQ. He then said we could sleep in his 2 empty rooms that night, so that we didn't need to set up the tent. We talked for a while, had a couple of drinks, watched a movie before we hit the sack. The next morning we ran into Mildura and picked up the balancer, a timing belt, and a couple other things we were going to need. We came back, and Mick pulled the bottom gear off the timing belt (Long story involved with this, only mechanics would understand, will skip for now, just say not easy), replaced the seal in behind, and started to put our littleist hobo back together, though I an not tempted to call our car Humpty Dumpty. The car was finished and running by about 4:00, which was a relief, in total we must have put about 12 hours each into fixing the car, and Mick was there for about 7 of them. Since it was late that day Mick offered us the use of his house for another night. We cooked supper for him that night as I thought he was being more than generous. In the end Mick only wanted 150 bucks for the use of his tools, 7 hours of labour, letting us stay at his place for 2 days, running us to town to go get parts, feeding us a couple of meals, and giving us a few beer. You know if we had broken down anywhere else, this would have been a disaster and a nightmare, but because we broke down beside an almond field 3 minutes from Mick's house, because he just so happened to be driving by getting parts for another job while I was leaning into our engine compartment, and because Mick is such a wonderful cool guy, this turned out to be a major highlight of my trip so far. I originally believed it was unfortunate that our car broke down, but in the end I believe it was actually fortunate that we did, and that it did so in Cliffside, rather than anywhere else in the country, or else we never would have met Mick. If we had of brought it to a garage, it would have coasted us well over 1200 including parts. I am planning on doing something special for him to say thanks from the bottom of my heart, I am going to send this story to the CBC's Vynal Cafe and nominate him for an Arthur award, for a magnificent act of Kindness to a pair of strangers that goes so beyond what most people would have believed possible. Not just for helping us with the car, but for inviting a pair of strangers to stay at his house after only meeting them 10 minutes before. Sometimes you wonder which is in control of the Universe fate chance, or luck? I remember John saying not to worry about things, that the universe will present a solution to a problem as long as you think positively, well if you are reading this, I think you can site this as an example to all of your friends, because it seems to work. It felt good to be knee deep in grease and oil, I haven't had that much fun since I got on the plane.

Adam