Well, not quite a day. More like five minutes. I haven't been for a swim since winter, so I collected Big Tony this morning and we went to Bondi for a paddle. I just had to get a swim in before the new year, and this was looking like a last chance.
One minute after picking Tony up in Drummoyne, we are sitting at some lights waiting to turn onto Victoria Rd just shy of the Iron Cove Bridge. There is a Shell petrol station opposite those lights, and Constable Plod loves to park in a corner of the station and radar cars speeding across the bridge.
I pointed out Plod to Tony, and lo and behold, Plod lit up and tore across the intersection in front of us, heading onto the bridge. That's not normal. Usually, they only bust people heading the other way.
About 30 seconds later, we get the green and turn towards the bridge. About a third of the way across the bridge is a car sideways across the road and impaled front end into the bridge pylons. Don't ask me how the guy did it, but we assumed that he was speeding, saw Plod, hit the panic pedal and went into an uncontrolled slide into the pylons.
Nobody got out of the car. Another driver got there before us and he had bailed out to assist. Unfortunately, he stopped in just the right position to reduce the bridge from four lanes wide to one. Within a minute, even at 7am, the traffic was snarled back pretty much to Gladesville.
We only had to wait a few minutes to get around the crash, and as we headed for the beach, we saw four more police cars roaring to the crash. Funny thing is, the site is about 100 metres from an Ambulance depot, but a meat wagon was nowhere to be seen.
What a time to be speeding and have a prang like that - 3 days before Christmas. Some people are complete dicks.
I should mention that the car in question was a Subaru with spoiler - the favourite fang-mobile of boy racers. Tony got a photo, but I will have to wait until he gets home from his holiday and emails it to me.
The excitement over, we got to Bondi and prepared for a dip. We met an old guy with an accent (Russian?) getting out of the water and he said "It eez very fresht". By that, he meant fucking freezing. We lasted about a minute. The surf was breaking too close inshore to bodysurf, and the swell was too lumpy to just float around pleasantly. It was time to have breakfast.
If I'd gone to the beach yesterday after riding home, I would have welcomed a dip in the ice bucket. I was steaming. It's been raining, or drizzling a bit lately, and the upshot is that riding is like pushing an elephant through a steam bath.
Breakfast was imbibed at Aqua Bar, since the Bondi Kiosk seems to have closed for Christmas. I had the eggs florentine, and they were awful. It was a muffin, then smoked salmon, then two poached eggs, and then something that tasted like Kraft cheese that had then been grilled over the lot. The salmon was cooked, which I hate, and the eggs were gunked up this awful cheesy mixture. I ate it, since I was famished, but I had to nick some mushrooms from Tony afterwards to get the taste out of my mouth. Ugh. They've changed their menu since I was last there earlier this year, and it has not improved.
At least the coffee was drinkable.
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