Last week I hit the City of Churches, Xenophonville, the place named after Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, home to the biggest glasshouses this side of Jakarta and a commuter's paradise where there are wide streets and not many cars and everything is 20 minutes away.
I was there to pick up The Weekend Australian Motoring Ford ute from intensive care after I had put a hole in the sump a giant panda and her mother-in-law could climb through. Also, the A-frame was history. The engine had more dust in it than the Sahara Desert on a windy night and the radiator had become a mud cake.
But after a few months with the state's best ICU team and a lot of second and third-hand parts, I drove a quick 1000km halfway across Australia and the only problem was the constant attention from the ute's legion of fans across this great continent. And the rocks they threw.