It was hot and I was bored and there were lots of Paddy Melons around.

Not too many days into our adventure we had to stop on the side of the road while someone fixed a shocker bolt that went missing in action. With time to kill and an abundance of Paddy Melons on the roadside we began to amuse ourselves and the slightly infamous paddy melon saga began.

Andy and Dave playing paddy melon bowlsThings being what they are when you have endless hours on the road you just look for anything to amuse yourself with and so things started innocently enough with a roadside game of bowls between Andy and Myself. The simple idea was to launch the melons some distance to see who could get the closest to a target melon. After his repairs Dave took over my winning position while I spent some time with soon to be Biggles writing the word Moke in Paddy Melons.

moke in paddy melonsNot really sure what were were doing at first but eventually we got in the swing of things and we constructed a very noticeable reference to our favourite cars in the Sand for fellow tourists to look down from their 4wd air conditioned cans and say, "I wish I was in a Moke". I took a couple of photos but it wasn't until Biggles drove over the word that he inadvertently highlighted things.

Back on the road on one of the patches of bitumen now most frequently between Broken Hill and Tiboburra I unleashed a couple of my little stash of melons to discover just how they handle being launched at 80-90kph from a Moke. As Andy and I had spent quite sometime at the MadMax Museum and reliving some of the locations of the filming I thought it would be appropriate to rush ahead , do a u-turn and time my release just as Andy came over a slight rise.

In much the same way many of the wide eyed shots of eyeballs bulging as baddies were about to impact heavy metal in the movie, my pommy mate was similarly surprised to be approaching a paddy melon at close to 200kph as he come over the rise. Sorry no photos, just ran out of hands and that would have really scared young Andy to see me holding a camera while hanging out of the Moke rolling a Melon at him.

Andy with his Melons in his Moke.A paddy melon retrieved after a rather decent roll down the road tends to look like a biker after filming one of the Victorian TAC advertisements, lots of grazed skin and a bit of bleeding. Not wanting to be greedy I tossed Andy a couple of Melons for his amusement.

Pretty much thought the Paddy melon fun was over once we had demolished most of them in one way or another while driving that morning, but I was wrong. A few days later one appeared from someones car, mine or Andy's, so this poor little Melon manged to find its way into sleeping bags and swags and other places when it was least wanted. There is just no end to high level fun on the road!!!

The very last Paddy Melon was discovered when I cleaned my moke out at Lightning Ridge and so in one last attempt at Moke Bowling I launched it at speed on one of the highways later that day in a manner that would have inspired Shane Warne's Flipper, or maybe it was Mick Malloy's flipper. Either way the paddy melon was to have the last laugh as my magnificent launch technique saw me gash my finger on the side mirror mount and thus the paddy Melon saga ended in blood and expletives. :)