On the road to one of life’s lessons

NO ONE said moving out of home was a piece of cake.

After living in the same house for two decades, even living down the road can be a daunting hurdle.

Moving from a city like Melbourne — with all its bells and whistles — to a regional town is even more challenging.

I remember driving down the Hume Highway, leaving Mordialloc to call Wagga Wagga, NSW, my new home.

As if the unfamiliarity wasn’t enough, I had a fish tank, complete with goldfish, in the back of my car … water splashing from side to side.

I didn’t want to bring them on the 450km journey, but I had little faith that anyone back at home would look after them properly.

My old Falcon didn’t help matters either. To some, this lowered sedan with 18-inch rims would be a dream come true.

It felt like that to me at first — but it later turned out to be a rookie mistake.

This car’s kryptonite was anything that sat more than 30cm above the ground. Even just driving over a rock or a stick would send a ricochet through the entire cabin. As you can imagine, this didn’t fare well with my already-spilling fish tank. Upon arrival, my clothes and belongings were saturated. Much like the fish — which were frantically darting from side to side in their tank — I felt fairly stressed. Despite being a journalist, I have never prided myself on organisation. Here I was, a then 21-yearold, rocking up to a new town, and I hadn’t even found a place to settle. The next five hours were just as frantic as I found myself scrambling from hotel to Airbnb desperately searching for a crash-pad.

I arrived at a hotel that looked as if it had been plucked directly from the 1970s — but it was a place to sleep and I couldn’t knock it back.

My rest that night will go down as one of my worst ever.

I’m still convinced that beneath that mattress was a ton of bricks because I have never tossed and turned more in my life.

The following morning I remember rolling out of bed to face the first day of my new job with the benefit of a hardearned lesson.

Cheap hotels are cheap for a reason and fish tanks should be kept from cars.

And, for the record, all of the fish survived.