Another day at Ulladulla (or, as our German friends there like to call it, Oolladoolla) for lunch at the bowling club and a few laps in the heated pool.
Pulling into the Bunnings carpark to buy some hardware, I spotted this little beauty: a FIAT 500 Bambino, Italy's answer to the Mini, original right down to its 499cc two-cylinder engine.
As a teenager in Germany, just after I had successfully completed my articles and chucked a promising but ill-paid actuarial career in the insurance industry and joined the large highway construction company Sager & Woerner (SAWOE) as their payroll clerk, I had bought myself a second-hand FIAT 500 Bambino so as to follow every few months the "Autobahn" under construction from Walsrode to Verden-an-der-Aller to Bremen.
My little Bambino not only carried me to and from work, it also brought me (and sometimes up to four friends, one in the passenger seat, three squeezed into the tiny backseat) safely home after a night of carousing.
Until that one fateful day when it had had enough which, happily, coincided with my also having had enough of the 'Vaterland'. So, without a car and a care in the world and still a teenager (a word, incidentally, which we used to pronounce the German way to make us, literally, 'tea gnawers'), I boarded the Italian passenger ship FLAVIA on the last day of June in the year 1965 and sailed for Australia.
Ciao, Bambino!
