Travelling, travelling, travelling

I know every centimetre of the F3. If the RTA ever wants a consumer expert on what they classify as ‘Main Road 6003’, but we know as the Sydney-Newcastle freeway, or the F3 - I’m it. I know every bend, every pothole, and every tree at the side of every stretch of the road, exactly where the highway patrol hides out, at what point 702 ABC Sydney drops out and 1233 ABC Newcastle drops in (unfortunately not the same point).

I know how far along the F3 a ½ tank of petrol will take me, along with everywhere I can refill. I know every takeaway food outlet and I thank the culinary gods for Oliver’s at Wyong, which serves the only edible food on the whole freeway.

I’ve driven the F3 at sunrise, sunset and on one dramatic occasion between 1.00am and 4.00am sobbing all the way (definitely the hairiest trip of all). I used to find the trip exhilarating. “I’m going on an adventure! I’m going to see the Country Mouse! I am having a weekend away! F3 I love yooouuu!”

Wow the F3 even has its own online presence (impressive eh?): http://www.ozroads.com.au/NSW/Freeways/F3/f3.htm

With musical goddess Joni Mitchell providing my F3 soundtrack I would often sing as I drove, with ‘All I Want’ from Blue a particular favourite:

“I am travelling, travelling, travelling, travelling
Looking for something, what can it be...

And later in the song I used to max up the volume:

“I want to be strong I want to laugh along
I want to belong to the living
Alive, alive, I want to get up and jive.”

But as the weeks turned to months it became obvious that because the Country Mouse is also a Musical Mouse I would be travelling north far more than he would be travelling south. It was about then that my F3 love affair turned sour.

That formerly wonderful road, which had taken me on such great new adventures, soon became just another stretch of bitumen I knew all too well. The gloss had gone off our romance. The honeymoon was over.

A trip to the Country Mouse involves a drive through Sydney’s leafy northern suburbs to reach the F3 turnoff. This is an area of inevitable traffic holdups and is surely one of the most persistent traffic snarls in Sydney. At first I was irritated, but philosophical, at the bumper-to-bumper cars; after all, what was a little traffic jam? I would soon be on my fabulous F3 and doing that magical straight through run to Newcastle and the Hunter Valley.

But as my Friday nights turned into a regularly weekly car crawl through Lindfield-Turramurra-Roseville and surrounds, my mild irritation turned to a snarling growl and I cursed the barely moving traffic like a resentful wife. By the time I got to the F3 turnoff I was livid.

I used to calculate a good trip at about two and a half, or if the traffic was troublesome three hours tops. One Friday night I hit an all-time travelling low, clocking the trip at three hours and 40 minutes. As this unfortunate Friday night also happened to coincide with a BBQ I was supposed to attend, and therefore missed, the timing of this Worst Trip Ever couldn’t have been more difficult.

The answer? Public transport. I would go to the country by train. How civil! I would take music, books, magazines and my laptop, damn, I could even sleep the whole way up and back if I wanted to. The train was a cheap, clean and green alternative to my increasingly frustrating car trip. F3 - you’re dropped! It’s over between us.

My new travelling regime was perfect for a month or so, until my last public transport trip which, after starting well enough, soon disintegrated into farce. It began uneventfully; I left home and headed to my local bus stop to catch a train to Central station, it was 2.00pm and there was a bus due at 2.10pm. It didn’t show, nor did the following bus, or the bus after, or the bus after. Between 2.10pm and 3.10pm there should have been four buses cruising past, instead there were none.

I went home and rang a taxi, thinking I could make up time by going directly to Strathfield station. The problem? I didn’t know how to get there and obviously the taxi driver didn’t either. By the time I had done a tour of the greater Sydney area, only to find myself one suburb away from where I had begun – in the wrong direction of Strathfield - it was obvious the taxi driver was lost, or just blatantly ripping me off.

I exited the taxi, cursing the fare, the driver and the trip. I walked to the nearest train station and made it to Central, only to realise to my teeth-gnashing frustration that I had just missed the Newcastle train. Do I need to state the obvious – that country trains do not run regularly?

When I finally caught the next train, feeling like a broken woman, I couldn’t help myself; as my train passed through Summer Hill, I could almost see my house. No, no, no I told myself – do not look at your watch! I tried to resist, I did, but I couldn’t help it. It was exactly 5.00pm, in three hours I had gone everywhere, but nowhere. I was back where I began.