And his night driver. And the cab’s owner, who would likely marry him if he wasn’t already taken.

Two delightful people and we had a lovely evening – very rare for us to actually have some free time together. Usually we are ships passing in the night.

They brought over a board game to play, and when they unpacked it and set it up, my heart sank. This looked very complex and detailed, and most likely they would wipe the floor with Kerri and I.

As it happened, that turned out to be the case, but we had a lot of fun on the way. The game itself has a lot of diverse components, but play itself is pretty simple. On a map of North America, various rail routes link cities, and each player has to claim rail lines by placing little coloured railway carriages along the routes. You get a series of “tickets” which describe cities that must be linked. Portland to Seattle is not much of a chore, but Vancouver to Miami is stretching things!

This is definitely a game for taxidrivers, where constructing the longest possible path between two points is handsomely rewarded. I did my best, but faced with two quick minds experienced in the game, Kerri and I were outshone in every game.

In the most charming way.

The map of the USA I’d been using to describe the route for our upcoming rip to my son was on the table, and I went over it again with our visitors.

Peskie and I had planned this trip a year or so back, as a charity drive along Route 66 in a New York cab, but the venture gradually turned into something quite different. Maybe one day we’ll have that adventure.

I’m going to miss Peskie. If he picks someone up from the airport in the morning, he’ll likely arrange for me to collect them for the ride back in the afternoon, and the passenger and I will spend the trip telling each other what a wonderful bloke he is.

Personally, I think he’s wasted as a taxidriver – he should be out running the country instead of the current crop of overpaid imbeciles – but as he’s chosen to share my line of employment, I’m glad of his company.

They got in on the main city rank, now re-opened at a third the original size. “Can we stop at a bottle-o first?” one asked.

“Right-oh!” I replied. “But where are we going?”

“Formule 1″

“You beauty!” I thought to myself. The Formule 1 motel is one of those cheapo deals out on the highway. $59 a night for a basic room and the dining room is a vending machine.

But it’s a nice long fare.

We went through Braddon, stopping at the Bottle-O there. That’s the trade name, and it’s a good one. Well-stocked grog shop, free parking outside, off-licence to print money, it is.

One of the two young men went inside and I hit the “Pause” button on the meter. It was going to be a good fare and people who stay at cheap motels are reaching into their own pockets to count the pennies. I look after them.

The guy in the back seat, a fairly chunky sort of fella, caught sight of the “Route 66″ keyring I have bluetacked to the dashboard. It’s one I bought at the Route 66 museum in Chandler, OK last year, and I keep it there for daydreaming purposes. That half day spent exploring the old road between Tulsa and Oklahoma City was a very happy one!

“I’m going to ride Route 66 next year with my father,” he said. “We’ll pick up the Harleys in Detroit, ride them to LA, and ship them home.”

Wow! What a trip! This chap immediately had my attention.

His mate got back in, with a six pack of Jim Beams to help the night ahead go down, and we set off on Canberra’s own Mother Road. Northbourne Avenue.

We talked Route 66 and the USA all the way. The food, the cars, the motels, the people. I mentioned that I’m planning my own father-son trip along Route 66 next year. From the other side of the generation gap. Myself, my son and my daughter.

I had lusted after a rental Mustang, but looking at the reviews it sounds like it wouldn’t be as much fun for the third person, sitting in the cramped back seat, peering out through a couple of tiny side windows. I’d be doing a lot of the driving, but some of the time it would be me in the back seat, and I wanted to enjoy the experience.

So we’ll likely hire something with a bit of size and a bit of style. A Chrysler 300C would be ideal. Lots of room for people and baggage, space for extras, a bunch of buttons to press and an image that is unmistakably All-American.

Not as much fun as a Harley, to be sure, but I’m not a Harley kind of guy. I wished my passengers the best for the trip, put my foot down and whipped off in a cloud of dust for the airport, where I watched the planes climb into the night sky and sent my thoughts with them.

Earlier that day, a package from Amazon had arrived, containing a DVD: Route 66: Producer’s Picks.

Not a lot to do with Route 66 as such, but for the feeling of driving through Sixties America in a classy car, there’s nothing to beat it. The black and white scenes, the corny live-to-camera adverts, the unforgettable theme music, the guest appearances of later stars, the thought-provoking plots, and above all the lifestyle, it’s a pleasure to watch.

I’ve got a bunch of maps and guidebooks, any number of websites, and all my dreams to keep me going until next year.

Evenings are like that. Most of the afternoon rush is from the big offices and hotels to the airport, and once out there cabbies tend to stick around and have a chat with their mates when they see the work in town drying up.

I’d just taken a short fare from Woden to a nearby suburb, and as the hospital zone was showing only one cab logged in, with a half dozen jobs in the past hour, I parked in the taxi rank at the entrance. If I didn’t get a radio call from the surrounding residences, I might get a patient or a doctor fed up with the chronic lack of hospital parking.

Instead, nothing happened for half an hour and I checked my emails on the laptop. People would come out the hospital entrance and head towards me and then walk past to one of the other buildings, so I was always looking up and being disappointed.

Finally, the door opened and a man got in, sitting down beside me and growling.

Yeah. Growling, and if it wasn’t growling, it was snarling, his face contorted into a mask of anger. Honestly, I almost opened my own door to run away in panic.

However, I listened carefully, hoping to get some useful information out of the grunts and snorts.

I’m good that way. People tell me where to go, I take them there, and then they give me money. It’s a pleasant system, and it helps reduce stress at traffic lights and in traffic jams. I glance down at the meter, happily ticking away, and life is sunny.

No instructions were forthcoming. The man gave up, dug around in his pocket and fished out a torn piece of paper with a name printed on it.

I read the name. He looked hopeful. “Is that you?” I asked.

He nodded and pointed off down the road, with a hand that was shrunken and deformed into a claw.

“You can show me where to go?”

He nodded and gestured again.

I indicated, pulled away from the rank, turned on the meter and headed off into the winter dark.

I was pretty nervous, to be honest. Most passengers are very good, and most of my work is what you might call mind-numbingly repetitive. It’s the fares that are a bit out of the ordinary that bother me, because I’ve got to work out how to handle things on the fly, and if I make a mistake, it’s a vicious circle.

I once had a tourist with limited English, and when I drove him late at night to the Formule 1 motel out on the highway, taking the back road past the television studios and the bushland and the kangaroos, he ceased believing me when I mistakenly told him it was very close a couple of times, and he demanded I stop and let him out. He paid off and must have walked a long way back to civilisation, but I couldn’t have taken him the last two hundred metres to the (invisible from the road) motel, because he had clearly ceased to trust me and was on the verge of taking action against the obviously mad cabbie.

My bloke tonight couldn’t talk, he looked (and sounded) angry, and I had no idea where I was driving him. I was hoping for a short fare, to tell the truth. A house in one of the nearby streets, maybe.

Instead, he directed me out onto the main road and we sped up to match the traffic. He was pretty good at giving good indications of directions, and which lane I should be in, so I relaxed a bit. I’ve often said that language is not a problem with cabbies, as you can always tell the driver where to go with four hand signals. Go. Left. Right. Stop.

And heaven knows that there are often language barriers with cabbies. Immigrants arrive and get a cab licence because it’s an easy job, and they learn English on the go. If the passenger doesn’t know where to go, like because you’ve just picked up a tourist at the airport, why you simply hand them the street directory and they will tell you. And if there are any mistakes, hey, the meter’s running.

My passenger directed me off the main road, through the suburb of Curtin and north. I kept glancing at him as we approached each intersection, but he wanted me to drive on.

The last houses disappeared and then we were on the Cotter Road and soon on Lady Denman Drive, past horse paddocks, bushland, the zoo and the dam. Not quite your howling wilderness, but neither was it a busy road. I started wondering about someone scrawling a name on a bit of paper and luring an innocent cabbie out into a deserted layby.

Through a tricky intersection and on through Gridloch Interchange, heading for Belconnen. He seemed happy as we poured up Bindubi Street, tapping his hand in time with Chet Baker, the soft jazz soothing the savage breast.

We stopt at lights near the shops, and he gave some instructions, drawing a diagram with his finger on the console. Right and left and right. Right.

That took us to the hospital. Calvary Hospital instead of Canberra Hospital. My son bashes dixies at Calvary, and it’s a pleasant place, surrounded by bushland.

We were met at the main entrance. A man who seemed very pleased to see my passenger, who positively bounded out like a puppy and skipped away with him.

Um. Thirty three dollars on the meter. The man had muttered something about getting a Cabcharge, but here I was, sitting empty, passenger door open. Waiting.

Waiting.

Ten minutes and the man came back with a card, paying the fare.

“I’ll bet he has a lot of trouble with other cabbies!” I said.

“Yeah. He’s really a sweet guy. Thanks for your trouble.”

And it was no trouble, really. Sure, a bit of anxiety here and there, but once I stept into his shoes and saw cabdrivers through his eyes and imagined some of the worries he’d have with them, it was no trouble at all. No wonder he was tense and nervous to begin with. I’ll bet that he’d been taken for a drunk or a lunatic any number of times, and when he couldn’t explain, it would be even worse.

That’s one of the delights of the job. The regular fares are pleasant enough, and the money’s nice, and a couple of times a shift I’ll have a good old chat with a passenger, but you never know who is going to jump into the passenger seat and tell you where to go. Every shift is the same, but different.

“You free?” they asked.

Avoiding the obvious riposte, I indicated that I was available.

“EPIC,” they said.

I agreed. Exhibition Park in Canberra. Not on the way to the airport, but a nice fare, straight up Northbourne. The National Folk Festival is being held there in a few days, and these folk looked like early attendees.

Dropped them off at the main entrance, headed back down the road. Northbourne Avenue is as close as Canberra comes to having a main street. The Federal Highway from Sydney becomes Northbourne about where EPIC is located, and suddenly drivers are out of highway mode, sliding through suburbs and motels, the flagpole of Parliament House visible in the far distance on Capital Hill across the lake.

An odd car ahead of me. Covered in advertising, foreign numberplate, roof rack full of stuff. I pulled out my camera, but the battery pack was exhausted, so my fallback was the iPhone’s minicam.

I pulled alongside when the lights turned red at Antill Street. Quite a long change. The smiling driver noticed me beside him, wound down his window and told me he’d driven here from Switzerland.

I was astonished. I’ve heard of people doing such things, and indeed my first book was partly inspired by two such journeys (same vehicle, same people, thirty-five years apart), but here was one of these rare marvels actually driving down Northbourne Avenue!

“It took me seven months!” he said proudly. I nodded – such an epic journey over some of the most difficult territory in the world.

I could see the lights about to change. I won’t say I’m familiar with the patterns of every intersection in Canberra, but most of the major ones, you get to know them well.

“Do you have a blog?” I asked. Strange to be chatting with a driver of another vehicle. His steering wheel was on the left hand side of his Volvo, so of course he was only about a metre away.

“On the roof,” he said, indicating behind him. Sure enough, on one of the components of his roof equipment – he seemed to have an entire ecosystem up there, covered in advertising – was a web address: www.lcbdirect.ch.

The lights changed and we went our different ways. I got most of the way to the airport, before a radio job took me off to West Belconnen, and it wasn’t for some time that I had leisure to whip out the laptop to check out his adventure.

He drove from Switzerland to see the Melbourne Cup!

His blog, in a PDF format, is here.

What a story! He wisely drove with a succession of co-drivers, who wrote a lot of the blog entries, and there are some truly hair-raising adventures along the way, not least with machine-gun toting soldiers and policemen helping or hindering the journey.

More later.

– Peter Mac

We share the same car, but he has all the fun and takes the great photographs. Dawn over Canberra and Pete’s out on the road, camera in hand, angling for the perfect shot. Me, I’m punching out zeds when the sun comes up, and when it goes down, I’m also flat out.

I couldn’t ask for a better co-driver, actually. The cab’s always clean and sparkling and fresh. The highlight of my day is taxi shift changeover, when we chat for a few minutes about the passengers, the car, the city, the weather.

It’s been pretty perfect the past few days. The late summer skies are clear and blue, the lawns are green, the trees just starting to get a hint of a tint. The politicians, the public servants, the students and cadets are all back in town and it’s bumper times for cabbies.

And now life just got rosier with my co-blogger signing on to write when I’m sleeping.

Welcome, PeskiePete!

–Skyring, night driver

One of my long time favorites is “Blank Top Chronicles”, the blog of a taxi despatcher from Arlington, Virginia. Between the endless tedium of answering phonecalls from people wanting cabs and sending cabs to collect them, he keeps a blog of some of the more ridiculous examples of stupidity, ignorance and malevolence.

ME: What’s the address you need to be picked up from?
GUY: I’m at Arlington Cemetery.
ME: Okay, the only place there where we pick up is the taxi stand inside the main gate. Is that where you are?
GUY: I’m not sure where that is.
ME: You can ask one of the guards, they’ll direct you there.
GUY: Okay, hold on a second. . . Sir? SIR! EXCUSE ME, SIR! SIR?!?! EXCUSE ME!!! SIR!!! . . . I’m here at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the guards aren’t paying any attention to me . . . SIR!!! HEY, EXCUSE ME. . .
ME: WAIT, STOP!!! You’re at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier? That’s a CEREMONIAL GUARD! They aren’t allowed to break routine!
GUY: Oh, I was wondering why they were being so serious.
ME: Good God. Just find a regular guard.
GUY: I don’t see any around . . . Oh wait, here comes one.
ME: I’ll bet.

These sorts of incidents, gleefully recounted, kept me limp with laughter for days while I scrolled back through the archives. But of late, the entries and updates have become increasingly sparse, and when I went to the site, there was a message saying Sorry, the blog at blanktop.blogspot.com has been removed.

However, all is not lost, and Google has cached some of the entries. The most recent pages are here.