It's game over....

[vipergts]

...for me anyhow.

Salt all over the roads around here tonight.......It's not even cold out there.

Does my head in

[Phil]

A pity. Hopefully you got/will get rain to wash the salt and be able to driev the E again before next year.

No salt and no snow yet over here (South of Belgium) . November was very dry and in fact we had rain yesterday (more in one day than over the month ...). Just took the E for an hour drive as the weather forecast for the WE is rain and rain...

[Phil]

Same over here now
We have snow and salt on the roads since Friday evening. I had my last drive last WE on Sunday : cold outside but dry roads, took the E out for a stretch but after 15 minutes came onto a road where the local authority did spray the road with a lot of salt, so drove back home on the salt-free roads to put the cat back in the garage.

Well at least if was a good year with many miles and smiles related to E50 activities and drives : I went to Reims , Silverstone, Spa... and here below a photo while driving the " Circuit of Ardennes" commemoration with my son Olivier .

[vee12eman]

No salt down here!

Problem is I have no air-con!

Perhaps a project for the future. I can put up with the heat, especially as they don't need salt at all down here, so it's driveable all year round. Ironic really because I originally prepared the car for UK roads, so loads of 2-part underseal was used! Helps with sound deadening though.

Have to say I don't miss the frost/snow!

All the best, stay wrapped up!

Regards,

[Tony]

Now that is just rubbing salt into the wound. At least we do not have to contend with Man Eating Kangaroos and Blood Sucking Wombats.

I cannot think of any other disadvantages to living in Australia, maybe we have a SNG supplier more handy

[MarkE]

I well remember driving my old XJS in Melbourne in 44C with the heater on and aircon off to stop it from overheating! The 2 or 3 hour queue to get in and out of the city to find any interesting roads to drive, the dust, the speed cameras that nab you for doing 63kph in a 60kph area. And out in the bush I hit a kangeroo and a wombat on two different occasions and wrote each car off!

I'll stick to the frost and snow, and decent British beer!!!

[vee12eman]

Well, I take your point about 44 degrees, except, how often does that happen? The E-type is a fun car, not an every day car and there are definitely less 40+ degree days here than days with salt/frost/rain etc. anywhere in the UK. As for a 2 hour drive from the city, don't make me laugh! I lived in Birmingham and near London for much of my life and never, in three years of living here, have I seen a Traffic Jam to rival the M25 or, worse yet, the M5-M6 junction!

Driving to work from my home, on the rare occasion I do so, is 30 minutes, unless I go in at 0800 Monday to Friday - which of course I avoid. Heading in the other direction, I can be on the Coastal roads down the newly built (and still being extended) freeway, in an hour, getting stunning roads and views. Of course, you select your time to go - avoid school holidays if you can (I can). I agree about speed cameras, but they are no worse than those in the UK, especially around cities and anyway, within about 15 km of my house, there is a 120 km/h road - faster than any legal limit in UK.

Oh yes, did I mention that petrol is around half the price of the UK (especially when you take in to account that the pound is so desperately weak at the moment, so an average Australian wage is artificially higher then UK rates in terms of exchange rates). My daily use car (a Toyota 4wd) runs on LPG, which, after discount at the petrol stations is about 30 - 35 pence a litre. The guys I work with complain about the cost and are surprised when I laugh at them, then horrified when I tell them why! Try running a large petrol 4wd in UK without a)going broke and b) being sneered at as blocking the road or being un-pc! I exclude those of you earning pilots wages etc! I am on an ordinary wage and happy!

Kangaroos on the road can be a problem and make a mess when you hit them. , but in the UK, there are far more cars, some of which seen hell bent on knocking you off the road - I spent enough years driving over there to know that! Funnily enough, the only wildlife I ever hit in the UK was a deer, fortunately slowly, but it too would have been a mess at higher speed (probably less than a 'roo, but still...). I also heard of several impacts with cows, horses and sheep!

Anyway, I'm staying put!! :D .

Just off to put my shorts and thongs on. (By the way - thongs = flip flops over here!)

Merry Christmas everyone!

[MarkE]

Ah Simon, I see that you?re still a proper Brit as you didn?t bang on about how good the freezing cold beer is out there, served up in glasses that over here you?d use to wash your eye!

I was in Melbourne for 6 years, and Sydney for 2, and had a ball. I only went out for a year for a bit of fun! I always lived pretty centrally in South Yarra and Albert Park (before it became a race track!) so my experience of the commute was going out to Tullamarine on a Monday (I nearly always worked interstate) and heading out to the country on the weekend. Or walking across the Botanical Gardens to get to my home office, which was a rare occurrence.

But recently I have been out to stay with an old chum who lives up in the Dandenongs, which used to be countryside when I was there, but is now the outer suburbs. He really does spend 3 or 4 hours a day in a car getting in and out of the city, and is pretty fed up with it all. The trouble is that property in the city is now London prices, whereas in the suburbs it has started to drop, after a very fast rise over the past few years.

The Aussie dollar is very strong currently, but when I came back in 1986 it was much stronger at 1.2A$ to the pound. Over the next year or so it dropped to 2.8A$ to the pound, where it more or less stayed for the next 20 years, and many of the folks I was working with in London were economic migrants from Australia!

I do miss the Aussie people and the Vietnamese food, but I have dual nationality which gives a fair bit of flexibility. I have now got used to living in the middle of the countryside, surrounded by fields and forest and hills, with nearest neighbours half a mile away. I get such a buzz still out of exploring the English and Welsh countryside, villages and towns, which never fail to get me going, no matter what the weather!

If I had to live in the suburbs of London, Manchester or Birmingham I would probably see things differently and may well be back to Oz?.but maybe up in Northern Queensland where it?s warm all year. But now I?m rugging up to go out and feed the sheep and the ducks, and break the ice on the water bowls!

[vee12eman]

Hi Mark,

You are right about the Dandenongs and all that, but I live in the Western Suburbs and work in Williamstown. Never takes me more than 20 minutes to tootle into work and occasionally I cycle in along th coastal path (did that last night, hving been dropped off with my bike in the morning).

Yes, I love living in the countryside, spent 18 years of my childhood in Birmingham, then joined the RAF and lived in country towns for the next 22 years - they don't build airfields in cities. However, my family stayed in Brum, so I always had to go back and queue to enter a city, where I would much rather not be, then queue to get out again. Then I worked for an airline (Monarch) and had to live in a small country town and travel daily to Luton and frequently had to travel South to Gatwick or North to Manchester. House prices in the South East were a joke and I lost thousands at the beginning of the GFC when I saw sense and got out! I got lucky and moved just before the pond nose dived and houses round here are still cheaper than when I left UK, although recent events may have changed that, I certainly don't keep up with property prices in UK today. Our house has a large double garage, with a workshop out back big enough for one and a half cars, if I chose, a large Alfresco area where we BBQ all year round, a balcony and several other lovely features and puts any house we owned or rented in UK to shame, yet cost less than my UK house sold for, even though I lost 60,000 pounds on that house in two years of owning it.

There is good beer out here, I was an ale drinker and have had to shift my habits slightly, but I brew my own from time to time, have found some lovely light ales, Guinness is still available and occasionally I even drink Lager! (Can't stand that VB stuff though!). It really is true though, that the cold beer is welcome, I have some nice small bottles in my dedicated beer/wine fridge, which I am perfectly happy to crack open of an evening on my Patio and enjoy the evening. By starting work at 0700 (which involves me leaving the house at the same time I used to in UK, but starting at 0800), I am clear to leave work about 1515 and be home well before 1600, I can hear my beer fridge calling as I open the front door.

I did modify the car (getting slightly back on-topic!), with an alloy radiator, Re-opus ignition, V12s fans, modern temperature sensor to replace the otter switch and twin modern relays to activate the fans and I am now looking at the ventilation system to improve that too. All this helps in the heat and satisfies my urge to work on the car as well as drive it. After that will be an injection system if I can find an old XJS, they are somewhat rarer over here, maybe I will take a working holiday and come and strip one down over there and lug it all back in my suitcase!

Regards and good luck with the ice smashing!

[Tony]

I should have be an Aussie by now. Mum and Dad had the ticket (?5 pom tickets) and we were all set to go. My mum got pregnant so it was all called off.(I was ten at the time.)
We again applied later in life and the family was accepted (I was about 22 at the time). All was going well until an IRA bomb made us evacuate the building.

For whatever reason after that we ended up not going. So we did not go and Jason Doniven got the job in neighbours instead of me.

Life is like that. Then again I would not have had the great family I have now and the E type may not have been in the garage. So all in all things have turned out great. It's still bloody wet though and summers in recent times have not been the best.

Hey Ho the wind and the rain.