Travel | 57
Gundagai’s Shell service centre makes a handy food or loo stop, but its fuel is very expensive. There’s plenty of room to overnight out the back if desired, though. passing B-doubles. Outside Melbourne it had been another very hot day and the next day – Thursday – was forecast even hotter, including a predicted 38ºC at home. I figured if I could make the border around 9:00 pm-and leave by 7:00 Thursday morning I’d be home by midday and beat the worst of the heat. All I had to do was stay awake a few more hours. On this trip I brought along a $35 4-in-1 Bluetooth dongle that plugs into the 12 V socket on the dash. It not only provides handsfree phone calls, it streams music from my iPhone via an FM transmitter and has 2 x USB charging outlets. I bought it some months ago and keep meaning to report on it, but this trip it got a real workout. My iPhone tells me it has about a continuous week’s worth of music and so all the way down and all the way back I worked through it. Polly’s radio aerial broke a
while back and I have a replacement, but only recently figured out how to install it. So radio reception is very short range and on this trip this $35 investment saved my bacon. The further north from Melbourne I drove the hotter it got and soon the cab curtain was drawn again and the windscreen and side window we're hot to touch. At Woollies service station in Laverton again it was 34.8ºC at 9 pm, so there was no chance of free camping and sleeping, and I didn’t want to try an rouse a grumpy caravan park owner from his afterhours television viewing. Fortunately the coffee and music had kicked in and I felt quite good, and so decided to press on to Holbrook or Gundagai and see if it cooled down. An enormous full moon rose over the hills east of Albury. The only traffic was trucks and with