Taxi 66

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.

Driving on the other side

Trying to get back to the airport after a lamb burrito in Zambrero, I was approached by a couple of jaunty folk. “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 [...]

Foursquare follies

We’ve got a new game, my day driver and I. A game where cabbies shine.

Foursquare, funking off the iPhone’s GPS and social networking. It’s a scavenger hunt, it’s a map of your day, it’s a point-scoring exercise, it’s gathering facts and sharing info.

Golden Horn

“He blows a golden trumpet,” I tell the passengers, and out of all jazz musicians, I think I love him most of all. He also sings, and some of his love songs are classics, full of emotion and wordplay. My kind of music.

Full of dreams to last the years

It was a quiet shift last night. I have a book with me – at the moment it’s Paul Theroux’x Ghost Train to the Eastern Star – but I rarely read in the cab, even if it’s such a rattling good railway story as this. Instead I succumbed to my romantic side and watched one [...]

My pleasure

Last night’s shift began on a high and I kept smiling all the way through. A normal enough Friday shift, and by normal I mean rest-of-the-year normal, not month-of-Sundays-January normal. There was plenty of work, and I was well into the afternoon rush, shuttling passengers to the airport. Once again, the airport road system has [...]

Christmas Cabbies

My days are about forty-eight hours long. It’s not that the night shifts stretch out interminably – on the contrary, the hours flash by – but that I’m always conscious of the hours before and after Canberra’s day. About the same time as I flip the meter onto the night-time rate, it’s midnight in New [...]