Everyone has sounds they like, which don’t seem to do anything for other people. It’s not weird. YOU are the weird one. Remember that old musical movie, The Taste of Tunes? The one about the strict military mother who hires a free-spirited child-minder who uses his free-spirited nature to bring life back into their German mansion via music. Heart-warming to a degree, but I really didn’t like the part at the end where the entire family became Nazis.

Yeah, so, anyway…there’s that song the guy sings about his favourite stuff. Doorbells and sleigh-bells and sauerkraut with fried rice. Pretty sure that’s how it goes. Sounds can be ultra-satisfying, and one of mine is the sound of a car driving on a crushed rock driveway. Mm, yeah. It’s like listening to a symphony, except better. It’s not the cheapest of home alterations, but I just had to get it for our driveway when we moved in. And I didn’t tell anyone, but that was part of what swayed me towards this place from the beginning: the driveway is unusually-long, so that’s several seconds of uninterrupted crunchy goodness.

It’s also pretty good as a soft alarm system. With straight concrete driveways, you can never really tell if there’s someone there, you know? Unless they have a really loud engine, that is. But with a crushed rock driveway, you can tell instantly. You get that lovely, crunchy, wheels-on-pebbles noise that tells you that the in-laws have arrived, they’ve brought their sixty-year-old game of Boggle with half the letters missing, and it’s time to make oneself very busy.

The only real drawback of a crushed rock driveway is that it’s a pain to walk on without shoes. As in a genuine pain. There, I will abide a small pathway of solid concrete or slabs, so that you may traverse your driveway, pick up the post from the post-box and get back without developing some kind of foot condition.

But really, even the sound of shoes on a gravel driveway…definitely ‘some of my favourite stuff.’ If you need recommendations for driveway toppings around Cranbourne, you can trust me. I’ve listened to them all.

-Garth