Sheila's on wheels!

After the tennis finished in Melbourne we realised we had been there for 2 weeks and it might be time to move on. Considering a lot of the people in the hostel had bought cars recently, and we didn't fancy shelling out considerable amounts of money on taking more buses everywhere, we looked into buying a car. Like most things in Oz, its not easy. Similarly to the UK, where you need an MOT in order to get your car taxed, you need a 'Roadworthy' certificate to get your 'rego'. However, this has to be done in the state where the car is registered which brings up so many issues as all of the cars for sale through other travellers were from entirely different states, and so it seemed impossible. After a couple of days of head scratching we decided to just go for it and we met up with this New Zealand couple selling their 1994 Ford Falcon. They turned up and the car seemed ok except it was registered miles and miles away, although they assured us this would be fine. We probably should have been a bit more cautious given that the lad was a spotty 18 year old and used the word 'kewl'. A few days later and yep, it all fell through...so we went out, ate some cake, and rented a car to go out to the suburbs of Melbourne and find a cheap car from a dealer. We set out with high hopes and went to a place called 'Melbourne's Cheapest Cars'. We can't go wrong. Then we were harassed by some old geezer named 'Ken' ('Barnesy' to his pals) who told us to go and 'try the other 50 car lots down the road and you will still come back to Melbourne's cheapest cars'. So we did. We came back thanks to the allure of 2 cars....one sexy automatic beast with a pimpin cd player (complete with USB attachment!) and another in our price range that looked not unlike Alan Partridge's car in his pre-Lexus days. After some deliberation and sweet talking by the 70 odd sly salesman, we went for the first car...and picked it up a a few days later and set off on our journey!