Sing ho for the open highway! Sing ho for the open road!
(Groucho Marx in A Night at the Opera, 1935)
Pictured above and below are highlights of yesterday’s round trip to Ballarat with Shane Jones. We hired a truck for the day, intending to transport our wooden plan cabinets, their drawers jammed with decades of prints and drawings. Those cabinets are mighty heavy, so we always remove the drawers to lessen the weight.
Fortunately, we had a last-minute change of plan, and substituted furniture and books. Halfway there, the heavens opened and didn’t let up for the rest of the day.
Upon arrival, we discovered that the air conditioning unit jutting out into the carport prevented us from backing up close to the studio. We managed get the books into the house and it was relatively easy to make a series of dashes down the driveway with the furniture. Neither books nor furniture were too much the worse for wear, despite the unrelenting downpour and a leak in the truck. I doubt the works on paper would have come out of it quite so well.
We rather enjoyed the adventure. I couldn’t help but think of those 1970s trucking movies I always associate with Burt Reynolds, or better yet, as I never really cared for them, the sublime Pee-wee Herman and Large Marge in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985).