Free Ride Like Hell and You'll Get There by Paul Carter

Dave and our flight back to Perth.
    The whole cabin was spinning, I was nauseous, the in-flight meal smelt like a decomposing body, and my elementary canal started to go into spasm. Then Dave pulled the earphones from his head, spun his laptop screen at me, pointed to the paused frame of a female zombie with breast implants and joyfully declared she was a ZILF. That was the end of me. I vomited into the in-flight magazine and not the bag that was supposed to be there.
    ‘Can I eat your lunch then?’ asks Maximum Dave.
    ‘Choke on it, motherfucker.’ I had four more hours of this to get through.
    I’d lost two days, one spent in the hospital, the other in a dark hotel room. When we landed in Perth I turned on my phone as we wandered down the escalator towards the luggage carousel—I nearly had a nervous breakdown as 200-plus emails and messages flooded in.

DIEGO
    BECAUSE ANY TRIP out of Perth to the east coast chews up a day in travel, I had effectively been away for four days. In this time, Doug had managed to get a tentative yes from just one place on our list—the Corowa Airport near Albury-Wodonga on the border of Victoria and New South Wales. Apart from being the only option that suited our timeframe, and the only place that was amenable to our far-fetched plans, Corowa is well laid out with a 2-kilometre main runway and 200 metres of grass runoff in every direction.
    In the back of the cab on the way home from the airport as I scanned through the backlog of emails and messages, blatantly disregarding anything that wasn’t bike-related, I got a snapshot of Doug’s amazing feats over the past few days while I’d been wobbling around with vertigo: the Corowa airport management team had agreed; Doug was working on the local council; because the airport was being closed that week for the army to train their parachute display team, we needed to get the official permission from the army as well. It was Thursday, and all this had to happen by Monday, when we would have a one-hour window between eight and nine in the morning to use the main runway. Fuck me, it was going to be tight.
    I went straight into planning mode and called the guys at the uni to get the ball rolling on a plan to get there. I sent Colin the map of the airport runway, he came back to me straightaway, saying it would be a close call but the runway should be long enough.
    There was so much to do in so little time.
    First, we had to have the runway surface checked, get the insurance in place, a risk assessment including medical personnel, fire team, full radio comms monitoring with any aircraft that needed to come in, the speed data logging equipment and of course we still needed the army to give us the nod. That worried me because from my experiences with the defence forces there is a system, the chain of command, and I was sure they had much more important things to be focusing on than our bike run. But the following day the army—bless them—came straight back with a big fat ‘No Worries’ and by lunchtime it was all squared away for Monday, 19 March.
    The guys at the uni had the bike ready in the trailer and I had sorted out the accommodation in Corowa. That’s when I decided it would be fun to get my bike shipped over to Adelaide so I could ride to Corowa, then after the land-speed attempt I could ride down to Melbourne and get smashed with Clayton Jacobson. Picture a man who looks like he just ate an entire roast chicken without using his hands; he’s a big man, not in a fat way, but in a big man, big beard, big hair, big sense of humour way. I knew if I stayed over at Clay’s place I would then jump on the ferry the next day with a hangover and spend a week riding around Tasmania sobering up only to do it again on the way home. I didn’t make it to Tassie when I went around Australia on Betty the baby-faced-killer motorcycle two years ago so, hey, why not do it now?

    My bike-riding mate Diego is from Argentina, so he’s extremely well