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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Sunday 13 May 2007 (Day View) – I attend the Carindale Billycart Races.

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13.05.2007 – Sunday 13 May – Carindale Billycart Races

Morning

• I attended the Carindale Billycart Races. It wasn’t at all what I expected. They’d billed it as “Brisbane’s Biggest Billycart Races”, which is probably true. I’d naively coupled this with Cooktown’s June Weekend billycart races, and figured it’d be bigger, harder, more dangerous, more daring, more Crusty Demons of Dirt style. I mean, people used to travel up from down south with fibre-carbon carts, and Cooktown hasn’t been able to get public liability insurance for theirs, ever since a few blokes entered a beer-powered power pole as their billycart. An entire power pole—the things that hold up the powerlines—with car wheels. It must have weighed half a tonne. The hill they race down isn’t small, and it’s lined with people, and halfway down they got up the wobbles, nearly wiping out several hundred people, before thundering through the hay bales at the end, narrowly missing the police car, on down the street, through the mangrove swamp, and into the crocodile infested river.
  The Carindale Billycart Races were more of a subdued family affair—the average age of the carters was somewhere around seven. It was, however, absolutely hilarious—and everything was free. I went to buy chocolate milk, and was given it. A man was walking around with a freshly squeezed orange juice dispenser, giving out free drinks. An ice cream man was wandering around offering people ice creams. I was impressed. There was also a huge orange walking around, who later managed to crash his cart. The funniest part was when they loaded a turtle into a cart, and raced him. He managed to flip onto his back, as turtles do, and couldn’t get up. Then they raced a ten pin, versus Crazy John. The ten pin’s neck bent backwards in the most hilarious way, and as he couldn’t see a thing, he managed to skittle himself quite well—also unable to get up without help. It really was funny. It wasn’t at all what I was expecting, but the hilarity made up for that. They even had cheerleaders.

Evening

• I met Maz in the city, and we wandered around, eventually ending up back at Rosalie, where we had curry from the fantastic Indian place, along with Bronwen.