Is this a test or a warning?

So, it’s 9AM Sunday morning. Canberra has been having consistent rain for the past week.

Cassie’s parents are en route with a chainsaw to facilitate trimming a tree that is preventing a clean extraction (without breaking windows and denting panels) This will all be obvious in our next daylight post. Warren our next door neighbour came down at about 12:30 to help extract us – what a champion! Well, the laugh of it is, if we had reversed down this hill, I would not be up writing this post, because i would be sleeping in. As we headed down this relatively tame hill, it appeared that there was no longer room to turn around at the bottom. We stopped, and engaged reverse and had that distinct sinking sensation at the front wheels. It came totally as a surprise as it looked just like the rest of the road. I’ve driven a 2WD Yaris down it before with no problem whatsoever. Well, the short of it is, we sunk up to the bull bar and didn’t budge an inch. In fact, the ground could not even hold my weight. I walked around the front and for the second time was surprised how I sunk to my knees, the only thing holding me up was the bulbar. It was seriously like stepping into a swimming pool. Like quicksand.

If we had reversed down, we could have very easily winched back up using the big tree up the hill from us. No luck there. When Warren arrived, he successfully snatched us backwards, but because he couldn’t get a straight line pull, we ended up between the ‘swamp-road’ in front of us and a very rough collection of sawn-off branches conveniently at window height.
We tried to winch the car sideways using the pulley block and although was slightly successful (moved about a foot) it eventually snapped the winch rope :( The good part of this failure is that the rope did indeed fail very safely. With a sound like flicking a tea-towel, it fell to the ground of it’s own accord.
I had initially thought that it was due to the crazy angle and rough edges of the bulbar the rope was dragged over, but I actually think it was overloaded. Imagine how much force it would take to pull a car sideways… on a hill… in mud.

We then tried another approach using the snatch block, and the reused the broken winch rope to continue the sideways pull, but using the driving motion of warrens car as a high speed winch. Well, it didn’t move an inch which again makes me think we overloaded the rope as not even two tonne budged it.
We then tried incorporating a snatch strap into the above equation to give some ‘yank’ to an otherwise immobile situation. Well eventually this snapped the rope, but this one sounded like a gunshot as the snatch strap went flying into Warren’s tailgate.

So we gave up on the night and decided to return in the morning. We rang the police to tell them that the car was not stolen/abandoned or victim of the nearby flooding river.

However sleep eluded us. from 3AM to 7AM I’ve done nothing but stress, unable to calm down, pulse like 120. I can’t speak for Cassie but I assume she was in a similar state. I'm not sure what was worrying me, but I think it was that this could happen to us in the middle of nowhere. Here we can just call the NRMA as a backup plan. But what about Siberia?! This happened so easily and we could not see what we were in for. From the photo you may be able to see how it just looks like the ground around us.

At night, things always seem worse:
“What if it somehow falls down the hill into the river?”
“The insurance won’t cover that.”
“if that happened, we couldn’t afford to go this year and would have to postpone or forget the trip forever.”
“The holiday is over”
”There won’t be any insurance on our trip, if this happened it would be a total loss”
”What kind of lecture are we going to get from authorities tomorrow morning?”
”God I hope it doesn’t attract a crowd”
”What if Steven/Warren can’t get us out?”
“How much is a tow truck going to cost?”
”What if that truck gets bogged or they say no to recovering it”
”I’ll have to wreck it in place and recover the kitchen unit, fridge etc from the river floor”

You get the picture, my mind was not a nice place to be.

In the light of day, two things are apparent:
1) Insurance should cover it. I specifically asked them, they said that “so long as it’s not used for competition or racing, it’s covered, regardless of if it’s on a road or not”
2) When the ground dries, I’ll drive it straight out.

See the midnight logic?! Amazing.

Now I’m yet to see it today, it may be gone, or vandalised, but it’s like last night I went through every stage of the grieving process and am now calm to the idea that everything is fixable, everyone is safe.

More details later, hopefully I will have my car back today ;-)