Lost in the forrest

Just like life, sometimes we make wrong turns.When I left Mandy and Mark's for the next leg of my adventure I had two choices: the sensible one - turn right and head into Bellingen and find the Pacific Highway or turn left and take a gamble that I would be heading south. Naturally I took chose left and somehow ended up at the top of a mountain in the Gladstone Euclayptus Forrest. Bah Bown (it's the sound from the buzzer on Family Feud when you get a question wrong). You really can't tell just how perilous the road was by the photos but trust me it was particularly narrow with no room for error and the bottom of the Golf was scraping against the gravel road making a horrendous noise. I didn't know if to turn back or just keep going, well I couldn't turn back because the road, if you could call it that, had almost disappeared from the floods. I was wondering what would have happened if I got a flat tyre. I once did an 8 week mechanic's course for a magazine article once and all I can remember from it was to use a rag when taking the cap of the radiator.

I was having fun being lost the forest, giggling at my adventurous spirit until I saw all the fallen trees that had fallen down the mountain and the huge crevasses below. Somehow I managed to do a 18 point turn and make it back down, where I saw a dude in a pick up truck who I asked the road to the highway. He told me to turn right at the next road, which led me deeper and deeper into another forest - the Newell State Forrest. I was on the dirtiest of dirt roads and didn't see one other car when I suddenly had the thought that maybe the pick up truck dude was Ivan Milat Part Two and had called ahead to his brothers to head me off and then I'd be murdered and chopped up into five thousand pieces, buried in the forest, never to be heard of again. I'd hate to end up a footnote in a crime encyclopedia. Obviously that didn't happen and I made it to the Pacific Highway where cars zoomed and whooshed by. For the first time, I felt like I was really heading south. No, not my face, my car.