My mother is one of the most wonderful, generous, thoughtful, genuine, sincere and self sacrificing women whom you could ever have the good fortune to encounter.  She has always been the giver, the caretaker, the fixer, the taker of the broken eggs!  She has so many incredible strengths, amazing facets and inexplicable quirks to her character that I would not know what to do without her, and I love her more than I can put into words. In addition to being all these things and so many more, she is also mad as pants!

And we have known this for some time, because Aunty Mary (as we have all affectionately have been forced to refer to her as, to stop our childhood friends from continuing to call her Mrs X after years of fruitless entreaties to call her by her Christian name), is about as eccentric as a hatful of eels at a high tea party.  Every now and again, she brings us fresh evidence to support, and dare I say increase even, her Mad as Pants Status and this one I felt, I just had to share.  🙂

My Mum likes to travel.  And I don’t mean she hops on planes to hotel it around Europe, even though she does this.  And I don’t mean she jumps on cruise ships to sail around the Indian Ocean for weeks on end, even though she does this too. What I mean is she likes to TRAVEL.  From climbing the Himalayan foothills, to white water rafting down the Zambezi; from kissing the Blarney Stone to tramping in Milford Sound; from checking out the Lincoln Memorial and Times Square, to the visiting the Singapore Zoo… my Mum is up for going nearly anywhere at anytime in her never ending quest to see and experience new things.

But one of her regular and favourite travel tricks has always been to pack up her trusty 4WD and hit the road.  Now if you lived in London or somewhere that like that, hitting the road might not seem such a big deal… you can drive from one end of the UK to the other in a day if you’re keen and have enough coffee.  But in Australia, ‘hitting the road’ has entirely different meaning.  It involves long range fuel tanks, solar panels on your roof racks, a finely tuned list of camping gear, 12v refrigerators, dirt roads that aren’t on maps, national parks literally in the middle of nowhere and long stretches without mobile phone reception. And my Mum does this with gusto when the mood or an occasion takes her. With a cheery “I’ll be back some time in August,” we wave her good-bye in May and wait for the pictures of far distant places to start arriving via MMS and our 6-7pm ‘Telstra free hour’ phone calls when she’s found herself on the top of a mountain somewhere and has a rare moment of connection!

On her most recent road trip, she apparently found a small rock sitting on her car. Just a little red rock that must have been kicked up as she drove along an unsealed road, that landed on the four inch wide running board beneath the back doors of her Nissan Patrol.  She first noticed the little rock at Kununarra in the Kimberly region of Western Australia some three or four thousand kilometers from home.  She saw it was still there when she got to Darwin, still there when she got to Katherine, still there when she got to Roper River, Borroloola, Burketown, Julia Creek, Charters Towers, Emerald, Woorabinda, Miles, Toowoomba and eventually it was still there when she got home!

Since then. she has been all over South East Queensland – to the Tweed about five times, been to Bribie Island twice, Toowoomba a few times, Hervey Bay at least once and been running errands all over town, and her little (now, pet) rock remained.  The Nissan has been dutifully sent into the mechanic a couple of times as well and yet, the innocuous little rock remained in situ. And naturally she has washed her big 4WD several times across the duration, which after nearly 20 years of travelling the country together and so many memories, falls somewhere between the space of a prized possession and an old friend, and as such gets the attention it deserves.  And with each hand wash, Aunty Mary has just quietly left her little pet rock in its resting place on the back running board…

But last week, oh noes!  Her little pet rock was just gone.  We know not where.  Perhaps it was the victim of a vicious shopping centre speed bump?  Or maybe all this recent rain somehow unceremoniously washed it away?  Who knows?  It was just a little rock from the Kimberleys after all.  But my Mum noticed its absence and told us how long she had been carrying it around.

Of her more endearing weirdnesses… err qualities, is an obsession with fuel consumption and a compulsion to write down the date, place, literage, cost and odometer reading every time she fills the car up.  I mean, who does that for nearly 20 years?!? Oh, no wait, she used to do it for the Old Nissan too!  Make that 40 years! However on this occasion her little quirk has proved handy, as the information contained in her Big OCD Book O’Fuel Consumption and Car Maintenance has allowed us to work out that the little pet rock had been sitting on the back running board of her car for over 11,250km!  Through bush tracks and highways, mountain ranges and pouring rain, the little red pet rock hung in there from July 2012 to March 2013!  😛

Alas, the little pet rock is with us no longer… well no longer on Aunty Mary’s running board, and no doubt will be oddly missed.  And so, I put it to you good people of the internets, that while my Mum is the most generous and loving and usually rational of human beings, is not this behaviour indicative of being as Mad As Pants as they come?  For who in their right mind keeps a pet rock on their car’s running board for over nine months and 11,000kms… and doesn’t give the damn thing a name!?!?!