It is sometimes said that driving long distances clears your head.
I once spoke to a guy at a party who vouched for the therapeutic value of driving big trucks over the empty roads of Australia.
In the last week I have had two trips back and forward to the West Coast, one for pleasure and one for business.
I wish I could say I use these rare times of being alone with my thoughts productively. In 16 hours you would think a person concentrating hard while keeping a weather eye on the road and the landscape would be able to solve the problems of the world.
Or at the very least be able to concoct a column, ready to type the flawless prose as soon as the journey is over.
Unfortunately, I find it difficult on these trips to string two coherent thoughts together, let alone two cogent sentences. The odd idea does pop up but not as a response to pushing the thinking button. That sort of prompting leads only to a subject heading (eg, world poverty) and then wondering, for instance, how Zinzan broke his crown in Spain. I need to write things down before I know what I think. Sometimes this can be frightening.
A vacuum must be filled, however, and two themes do tend to recur as I’m driving along. One is home improvements. I remember reading how John Steinbeck, in his book about a road tour of America, with his dog (Travels with Charley), said he had while driving, in his mind remodelled his whole backyard. Well, it’s the same with me.
I have reconstructed floors, built new bookshelves, fixed foundations, shifted doors, laid a brilliant new patio under our pergola, built a new garage and refitted the bathroom, all in a leisurely drive between Christchurch and Dunedin. On the road, I am the ultimate handyman.
The other subject which dominates my musings is the theme of great business ideas. A marvellous idea for making money will suddenly come out of nowhere as I’m negotiating a difficult bend or passing a truck and trailer.
I don’t really think about how I would spend the money. It’s more about where I would build the factory, how the production process would work and how, eventually, I would sell the business to an international conglomerate for many millions and then retire at a young age.
Clearly, I am not the only one to whom brilliant ideas occur as they journey from A to B. I heard a great idea on the bus the other day from one of those gifted boys talking to his friend. They obviously had some sort of design project at school and he mentioned how clothes were designed to cover embarrassing bits of the body.
“Well,” he said, “we should design fashion for the ears.” I think he’s got something there.
Anyway, there I was driving to Hokitika and thinking how it was that all the bottled water in the world did not come from the West Coast. I was already thinking bottling plants, filtration systems, resource consents, distribution networks and brands when I realised it was probably already too late. Another business opportunity gone begging on the Best Coast, as the local radio station likes to call it.
Then came the brainwave. Half the world is drying up, right. Water is the new gold. Look at Australia, desperately parched after an endless dry. Well, what about a truly beautiful video showing images of New Zealand water. I imagine an Australian outback farmer coming in from a hot day’s work in the dustbowl, throwing himself in his favourite chair, opening a can of Fosters and playing his film of water scenes including torrential rain on West Coast roofs, glassy rivers flowing over glistening rocks, lakes lapping gently on quiet shores, blue water encased in sculptured canals and gorgeous maidens frolicking … sorry that last bit might be another sort of video.
But you get the idea. A soothing soundtrack from Don McGlashan (such as Anchor Me), a subtle product endorsement of my West Coast 100 per cent pure water and I think you would be on to a winner.
One concrete thing that did exercise my mind on this latest road trip was something you couldn’t possibly make up. On our way back from the coast on Sunday in our 1972 Holden Kingswood we broke down on the bridge over the Broken River near Mount Cheeseman. There is a song in there somewhere %26#150; as in “Busted down in Baton Rouge” (Bobby McGee) %26#150; but in another amazing coincidence, almost the first people to drive up and offer assistance were two mechanics (in separate vehicles).
Due to past dramas I had already ascertained it wasn’t a fuel problem and they whipped off the distributor cap and identified the problem as a broken wire in the points. They soon had the wire joined up with the aid of an old screwdriver and a sharp set of teeth and we were on our way again.
As we had to get off the bridge fast, I didn’t get their names. But many thanks to these two kind and useful people. Perhaps I could interest them in putting together a video.
Tags:
business ideas,
landscape,
money,
pergola,
plants,
rta,
west coast
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