WHAT do you get when you pair up a baker, a psychiatric nurse and a car that is almost 100 years old? The answer is a whole lot of fun.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Lifelong friends Tom O’Toole and Keith McIntosh passed through Bathurst on Thursday on their way to Byron Bay to kick-off an 8000 kilometre fundraising trip across Australia.
On Saturday, they will leave Australia’s most easterly point (Byron Bay) in Mr O’Toole’s 1930 A Model Ford and around a month later they will arrive in the country’s most westerly point – Shark Bay in Western Australia.
During the trip they will stop at towns and stations to spread the word about the Fiona Elsey Cancer Research Institute and hopefully raise at least $100,000 for the charity in the process.
“It’s the only regional cancer institute in regional Australia,” Mr O’Toole said of the centre based in Ballarat, Victoria.
He said there were not many people around these days who had not been touched by cancer.
“My mum died of cancer and Keith’s mum died of cancer and my brother has stage four cancer,” Mr O’Toole said.
During the cross-country trip, the duo will pass through some towns while other locations will be stations, and Mr O’Toole said the roads will be rough.
“If we get any rain they’ll close the roads, we’ll do plan B if it rains,” he said of alternate itineraries the duo may have to take.
Tom and I are mates and he’s the only person I can travel with on a distance like this.
- Keith McIntosh
Neither man is a mechanic and Mr O’Toole said his career as a baker probably won’t be much help on the road.
However, Mr McIntosh joked that Mr O’Toole had “fixed his lawnmower once so he thinks he can fix it [the A Model Ford]”.
The A Model Ford has no doors, no windscreen wipers and the duo will sit “with their knees against the petrol tank”.
Mr McIntosh, a retired psychiatric nurse, has been a friend of Mr O’Toole’s for the past 50 years.
“Tom and I are mates and he’s the only person I can travel with on a distance like this,” he said.
“I’m looking forward to seeing the inside, the desert of the country.”
Mr O’Toole has asked the community to get behind the cause and said if just 5000 people donated $20 each, the price of four cups of coffee, the duo would reach their $100,000 fundraising goal.
To make a donation of find out more visit Tom and Keith’s East to West Adventure online.