Gawd. It’s been 5 years since we acquired the perfect (for us) travelling circus setup. While we have done a fair bit of travelling during that time (only about 52,000 kilometres) something has always pulled us back or distracted us from being full time wanderers.

Well, we think, once more, that is all about to change.

We’re hitting the frog 🐸 & toad 🐡

The first big decision we needed to make was “in which direction do we travel around Australia?”. The last lap, about 8 years ago, we went Anti-Clockwise (kept the water on the right). This time we have decided to go Clockwise (& keep the water on the left). Clockwise is also a little bit longer as you’re always in the outside lane on the road.

Plans were made, sites were booked, people were lined up to be visited. In essence, the first part of the plan was to head South to Barwon Heads, VIC (about 1,400km) and to spend Christmas with some of Jayne’s family.

All that sounds pretty straight forward, right? Yeah? Nah. To illustrate the ridiculous nature of how our travel plans often pan out, let’s just review our launch into this endless wanderlust.

The big day came to move into the truck only to find that our main fridge had chilled it’s last Chardonnay. Do we repair or replace? Well, we had re-gassed it some months prior & all seemed OK. However, while turned off in storage, it appears to have run out of gas once more. The leak seems to be internal to the unit so it’s end game for da fridge.

With a feeling of the whole plan unravelling even before we have started, it was time to call a friend and a favour. We needed a new fridge ASAP.

So, it’s a Friday. We make the call to SLRV to see if

1. Do they have a replacement fridge? Yes. ✅

2. Can they install it first thing Monday? Yes. ✅

So, plans were re-made, sites were re-booked, people were re-lined up to be visited (Jayne loves doing that stuff). Sunday we drive the 450km to SLRV & start fridge replacement at about 7am Monday morning. All finished by 9am & then drive another 450km back home. Fortunately we found some cheap diesel. We managed to save about $150 on putting a total of about 507 litres in the tanks! Gotta love a bargain🙄.

“Why go all that way for a ferkin fridge?” you may be thinking. Well Amander has been built to fit a lot into a small space. Some things are just bigger on the inside. As it happens, the fridge won’t fit thru the door. The old/new fridge had to exit/enter via the sunroof above our bed. This required a special fridge tool (see image below) that we didn’t have. Luckily SLRV had the right fork-in gear & made it look easy.

We make it back home & set up camp at Big Hill, booked online & had the whole campsite to ourselves. We enjoyed a peaceful night being lulled to sleep by the rolling waves in sync with the occasional dull hum of our new fridge doing its thing.

6am Tuesday morning, there’s a knock on the door. It’s Kimbo, the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service ranger checking on us. He’d printed off his booking run sheet the night before prior to us booking online. So we weren’t on his list. I think he could have easily checked our rego to confirm our booking but I think he was just up for a chat & a good look at our setup.

Well, can’t waste daylight. We are now officially on the road.

Wooo Hooo!

30 Nov This entry was published on 30/11/2023 at 4:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.