Discovering a vehicle enveloped in mist by the side of the road in Charnwood, the two perplexed female police officers stopped their car to ask if everything was OK.
"We're fine," the driver replied.
"We've just blowing off a little steam!"
It's a throwaway line Julian Robinson, owner of the only Stanley Steamer motor car in the ACT region, had clearly used before.
But it got a good laugh yet again and the bemused officers gave a wave and drove on, shaking their heads at the silliness of men and their fascination with obscure machinery.
Steam power has been in the Robinson family for decades.
Julian's late father, Brian, was bonkers about steam-driven things and as a culmination of that passion, acquired a non-operable version of one of the most successful steam-powered cars ever manufactured, built by the Stanley Motor Carriage Company of Newton, Massachusetts.
That captivation with vaporisation was passed from father to son, as was the 1923 Stanley the pair worked on for years in the garage but never quite finished until Brian died a few years ago.
"I then took it on as a project and as a tribute to Dad," Julian Robinson.
"It was wonderful to get it finished and driving on the road."
Steam was driving automobiles, traction engines for agriculture and locomotives centuries before German engineer Karl Benz built arguably the first practical internal combustion automobile in 1885 and put it into production.
While internal combustion was still in its infancy, electric and steam-driven cars were the conveyance of choice among the progressive motoring folk of the early 1900s.
The Stanley twins, Francis and Freelan, built their wealth with a photographic process they then sold to Kodak, then set about their real passion of building steam-powered cars.
The Stanley Motor Carriage Company produced cars which were sold around the world. For a short period during the turn of the 20th century, there were 120 manufacturers of steam-powered cars in the US and more than half the cars on US roads were powered by steam.
"The first steam cars used kerosene to fire their boilers but my car was converted to use standard grade petrol," Mr Robinson said.
"The great advantage of steam cars is that you can use almost any liquid fuel to raise the steam. It doesn't produce emissions from combusting the fuel internally, but by burning it to make the steam."
Preparing for a journey in a steam car requires planning. Like a very slow-boiling kettle, the burners need about 30 minutes to raise the required steam pressure, accompanied by occasional hand-pumping to push the fuel through to the burners in drum-sized boiler under the front bonnet burners.
Unlike combustion cars, what appears to be a conventional radiator up front is a condenser, which condenses the steam from the engine and returns it as water to the water tank. This gives the Stanley a range of around 300km on 60 litres of water and, of course, you can fill up from a garden hose.
The components of Stanley's steam-powered road cars were robust and reliable and adapted by others.
In 1906, daredevil racer Fred Marriott built a low-clung Stanley Steamer Rocket which belted along the sands of a Florida beach to claim a then-world land speed record of 206kmh. He was confident of going even faster and returned the next year.
But at an estimated 240kmh, he hit a dip in the sand, lost control and totalled the Rocket. Fred Marriott survived the crash, but never continued his speed quest. His steam-powered speed record stood until 2009.
Mr Robinson said the Stanley Steamer was a popular choice among female owners at the time because they didn't have to hand-crank the engine. The first electric engine start wasn't introduced until Cadillac in 1912 and appeared on the Model T Ford as an option much later.
But it was ultimately Henry Ford's super-cheap Model T which brought about the demise of the steam car. After some two decades of commercial success and thousands of customers, the Stanley was no more.
"After setting up the world's first automobile assembly line, Ford could build his combustion cars in massive volume and for about a fifth the price of the Stanley Steamer," Mr Robinson said.
