Destination unknown

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Morning Bloggers,

A couple of weeks have gone by since our last blog, and we analyse our lives and look what has happened.

We went out on Sunday 17th April with Sharon and Tim Blyton and Sue and less Briggs, Les and Sue are a couple who we met through our 4 wheel drive club. Sharon, Tim and Wade were the Blyton family who we met at a great little camp site at Princess Margret Rose caves and in their words they "parked their T VAN right on top of us."

I honestly don’t remember it being that close, but I do remember having a great pile of fire wood, after I schmoozed the park keeper in to bringing over his chainsaw and cutting up a great big pile of wood, which we all sat around on a cool evening watching the flames dance well in to the night to the sounds of the koala's mating calls in the background.

This was two years ago, quite early in to our magnificent trip, around “The Island” when we met the Blyton family and Sharon, tells us that she has started to read the blog again, and well, the rest is history.

We all met at the Pide Turkish restaurant in Woden, apparently the word Pide is a Turkish bread. We had an absolutely fantastic evening, all chatting about travels and wetting our appetite to travel again.

We have a T-VAN booked for Thursday 21st April and we all we knew that Easter is a busy time and we were off somewhere to be decided. Sharon said that she and Tim were off for a couple of days, up to the Snowy mountains I think, and we would be more than welcome to join them, it was for a couple of days and we would give that some consideration.

Sue and Les were off somewhere, for the same Easter period and we had been investigating heading to the coast and hooking up with the "Travelin Truey's"so we needed to come up with a plan, to many people and places to choose from.

We all ended our evening promising to stay in touch and we were still somewhat shell shocked that people had been interested enough to catch up with us, on the blog.

We have listed all the things we need to do to the truck to make it capable of tripping us around Australia again, using the knowledge that we gathered from our first trip around, we are going to make use of this time to do some serious preparation, and because we are away for Easter with a T VAN we needed to have a dual battery fitted, with all the bits and pieces.

We have crossed this bridge before, I remember with the Patrol when we were in Broome we needed a replacement battery as we could not keep the fridge cool enough. So we have to educate ourselves to understand what we needed to make the system function. That’s what we have enjoyed about this trip, the whole necessity of discovery, honing new skills to have an easier ride.

We realised early on that we enjoyed “Going bush” and you come to the realisation that shops are huge distances away, so you have to prepare what you need to take with you, and a fridge is essential, if you are in the bush and you don't have it, then you go without.

For those bloggers who have followed out trip you will know that we "destroyed" 3 Fridges on our way around and at a point of exasperation, ended up buying a fridge that in our eyes, is possibly the best fridge money can buy, and was approved by the Australian Defence Force, as a fridge that would be mounted between the engine blocks on Australian tanks.

I think it totally civilised that Australian soldiers go in to battle with a cold one in the fridge. Should they run out of depleted uranium shells they could always start sliding a beer in to the breach. Anyway I am just being stupid now, I need to focus.

I had a call from a business contact last Friday, who said to me, “What are you doing on Easter Monday? If you would like to you can go and drive a V8 Super car for 4 laps around the circuit in Bathurst, and have 2 laps driven by John Bowes who is an ex V8 Super car champion, then lunch and a look around the pits etc." So it looks like our decision is made as to where we need to spend Easter and that will enable us to swingby Bathurst on our way home to Canberra.

We are going away to Coolah tops, about 120 K’s away from Coonabarabran, East of Forbes, not to far from the Warrumbungle national park, well in fact within the Warrumbungle mountain range. We will be away for 5 days and are really looking forward to our much needed break.

Saturday we had a new winch compatible Bull bar fitted to the truck, this has been on order for about seven weeks and had been specifically colour coded to match the truck, well Silver as the wheel arch extension. I was outside talking to someone at ARB when the technicians brought out the truck in to the sunshine and out the corner of my eye saw that the bull bar was the wrong colour, instead of being silver as I asked to match the wheel arch extension, it was Gun Metal grey to match the truck. "It’s the wrong colour!" I exclaimed, they looked mortified, I laughed and said there’s no point creating, its just got to be fixed.

I am quite happy being fussy, the company said if I wanted to keep the bull bar, they would make it very attractive indeed, but the money aside I don’t know if I would be happy with that as its “making do” with something that is not quite what we want, so I am going to live with it for a week or so before we make our final decision.

We have again been flat out at work, but that’s boring so we won’t talk about that any more, we have been trying to swim twice a week for exercise and managed to get out on the bikes last Sunday and cycled the Jerrabomberra wetlands track around lake Burley Griffin.

I have ordered a new Cannondale bike from a local bike shop and collect it on something like 1st may, when Caroline is away in Melbourne with the girls.

I had booked the day off for Thursday as I had to collect the hired T van and have the dual battery system completed as they were short of parts and could not finish the job. After dropping Caroline off at the office I then shot across town for 07.30 as I had and appointment with the T van lady and I just hitched her (Not the T Van lady) but the T van up to the cruiser and went in to Battery World to get my job done.

Caroline got home at about 2.30 and we were to meet our friends at the Petrol station at Eaglehawk at 16.00, it was touch and go if we were going to make it as things had gone on at work, that were important and it made Caroline late.

To save time, I called Caroline and asked her to get a taxi home as I was loading the Ute and preparing the trailer and would have had to break off from my chores.

We managed to get away just on time, by the skin of our teeth and met our friends at 3.40pm.

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Photos

A night out with Friends
Sharon , Tim, Sue and Les and of course Caroline and myself

The T van setup
At Coolah Tops National Park

Bull Bar
The wrong coloured bull bar