Belanglo (Apr 22)

For reasons that I cannot remember – though I suspect that forecast bad weather on winding mountain roads was top of mind – we decided to abandon our westward route and chance Sydney traffic. A decision we would come to regret. More on that shortly.

The weather forecast proved correct and while the approach to Sydney down the M1 was mostly clear, as we passed Mount White the rain began.

We were not about to pay the exorbitant tolls charged for caravans on Sydney’s toll roads, so we used Pennant Hills Rd for the first part of the urban trip. We used to live in Cherrybrook, so this area of the city was familiar to us.

Sydney

Skip ahead if you like. Our exact route isn't important. I use it as a prompt to remembering the details of the event as this was almost 4 years ago at the time of writing.

Taking Pennant Hills Rd all the way to Paramatta, we ignored James Ruse Drive due to the amount of traffic trying to turn right there (our first mistake) and went all the way to Church St / Windsor Rd. That left us will little choice but to turn left at Church St, then right onto George St and another left into O’Connell St which took us to the Great Western Highway. Towing the caravan through down town Parramatta was not the best choice. Turning right onto the Great Western Hwy took us to Jersey Rd / Cumberland Highway where we would have arrived – probably sooner – had we taken James Ruse Drive. Oh well… we got here. As an aside, my father’s sister, Val, used to live on Jersey Rd before it was widened into the highway it is now.

The weather – constant rain – made this a much slower trip than one would normally expect, but we don’t move fast in traffic anyway, so it didn’t bother us much.

So, a good few kilometres down the Cumberland Hwy and we reach the Hume Hwy. Still heavy traffic and moderate rain, but it feels like we are finally getting through the suburbs. A good number more Kms and we eventually reach the Hume Motorway heading south out of the city… passing suburbs like Macquarie Fields and Campbelltown that were considered beyond the outskirts of Greater Sydney when I was growing up in Blacktown. Once past them, however, traffic began to flow freely and quickly as you would expect a motorway should.

BANG!

Despite the weather, most of the traffic were still doing the 110 KM/h limit so we stuck to the left lane doing more like 90-100. Things were flowing nicely until just north of Pheasants Nest when… BAM!

For a split second I thought we had overturned for some unknown reason, but my senses quickly informed me that wasn’t true. All I knew was that my drivers mirror was missing and we had slewed sideways quite a bit. Fortunately, I retained control and the breakdown lane was still wide and paved, so I pulled over to take a look, despite the fast flowing traffic right beside us. I mean, what else could we do, given we had no real clue what had happened.

As it turned out, some idiot had sideswiped us. They had hit the drivers side near the front of the caravan, slicing a section out of the tunnel boot door, breaking the power inlet and putting a small dent in the front corner. They must have then continued closely along the side of the car, but not contacting anything until reaching the towing mirror. That was now, apparently, deposited on the motorway some way back. Fortunately, the car mirror was simply bent backwards on its mount and was unharmed and working perfectly once restored to the correct position.

The culprit was nowhere to be found.

Not wanting to risk any further incidents on the side of the highway, and seeing that we looked to be roadworthy, we pulled back into traffic and continued on our way, looking for a better place to survey the damage.

A few more KMs down the road we found an AMPOL Foodary. Here we pulled in and looked for a safe place to stop.

Shortly after stopping we were approached by a father and son who had witnessed the incident and had dashcam footage. Sadly, when we received it, it was unusable in identifying the offending vehicle, but we do know it was a man driving a white tray back ute. They also had footage of him getting fuel at the same servo, but it too wasn’t useful in identifying him. It didn’t help that they sent us the footage via text (MMS).

Having calmed down and covering the damage as best we could with duct tape, we headed off once again. Megan looked for a place we could stop for the night, finding the Gordon VC Rest Area just outside Belanglo State Forest.