A short trip

My brother in law had hired out his PA system and needed to go and pick it it up. The PA was sitting in a house about an hour's drive south of here. He asked if I wanted to come for the drive. Being a farrier, he also was going to clean up a horses feet while in the area.

On the way we stopped in Dannevirke to refuel. While BIL was dealing with filling the van I stood next to the footpath observing people and traffic. There was an old guy well into his seventies wandering down the footpath towards me. He stopped and watched as an old Chevy drove past and then resumed his walk.

"Gidday", I said as he got near me.

He stopped directly in front of me and said, "Did you see that Chevy that drove past? Did you see that Chevy?"

"Yes, I did", I replied.

"I got taught how to drive in exactly that model Chevy! I learned how to drive in one of those. My brother taught me. He taught me to drive at 50 miles an hour because he said you'll be going that fast any way once you have your licence. 50 miles an hour - that was the speed limit back in those days. Everything was in miles per hour.

"I bought a Chevy like that. It was a two door Chevy just like that one that went past before. I liked my Chevy. It was a good car to drive. I knew a bloke who had the four door model of that Chevy. I was driving down the road one day and he was driving the other way and I thought he's going to hit me! So I pulled right over to the side of the road and stopped and you know, the bugger came right over to my side of the road and he hit me! He bloody hit me! I couldn't believe it. Any way he had a rifle in the back seat of his car. It was sitting on the back seat and when he hit me it leaped off the back of the seat and hit him in the back of the head and it hit his wife in the back of the head. When it hit his wife in the back of the head she went forward and broke her nose on the dashboard!".

At that point I heard BIL start the van and had to try and gracefully extract myself from the one sided conversation. I left him on the footpath mumbling to himself. Obviously the Chevy had opened a window into his past.

The rest of the trip was good. I got to try on a new hat. I watched BIL do the job on the horse's hooves and give a bit of instruction on care to its owners. On the way back we stopped and watched a top dressing plane doing its bit. We also stopped at the Beyond the Bridge cafe in Balance, a farming area on the edge of the Manawatu Gorge. The BIL used to live in a horse drawn wagon on the premises quite a few years ago. The owners of the cafe were in the process of making a clay pizza oven outside the cafe. They were making the clay workable by trampling it with water in an old bath.