d18 – 3wk shakedown

 

Travel days:

We’re trying to make a point of only driving a couple of hours each day, for a couple of reasons.

– Our big ole motorhome Henry travels better and is more economical at a speed of around 90km.

– it’s less stress on Mabi (and us) if we keep our travel days to only a couple of hours, particularly as Mabi stands the whole time that the bus is in motion.
She will sit or lie down the second it stops, but as soon as it goes into gear, she pops back up again and stands the whole way to wherever we’re going.

That makes for a very exhausting trip for her – and for us it makes us wonder how that’s effecting her Addisons Disease – if at all.
It’s a discussion we’ll be having with the vet.

Shopping:

We stopped at Ingham to go to Coles and for Mabi to have a wander and a wee.
We also had to grab another poop-bag holder for one of her leads as we’ve given the old one such a hammering that we killed it.

When we arrived at Kurramine Beach, we checked to see if they had a site available for us (they did) and off we went to find it.

It’s a pretty little park that is well treed and right on the beach – which we all love – but we were put off a bit by finding someone already in ‘our’ site; so we picked another one that we liked then rang reception to make sure it wasn’t pre-booked and we could set up there…
We could.

There was an initial concern that the hook-ups for power and water were so far away that we didn’t know if our cord and hoses would reach, but we managed it fine – with the exception of the lil snafu where the Short One had forgotten to take the hose fitting off the tap at our previous site, so we had to ‘borrow’ one from an empty site.
Rookie error!

There was also a generator only about 30m away, thumping very loudly and belching blue smoke.
What they hadn’t told us on arrival was that the mains power was off to the Park!

A/C antics:

Last night the aircon was flashing a bit through the night – gawd knows why! – but it continued on working otherwise.

Today when we finally stopped and set up camp at Kurramine Beach, the aircon turned on as usual, then about 5 minutes later turned off.
We turned it back on again and it ran for about 5 minutes, then turned back off.

Being that the Park was running on a generator – as there was electrical work going on in the street – we thought maybe it was a power-fluctuation issue, so we left it off and set up fans instead and waited for the mains power to come back on.

A walk along the beach to clear our heads was in order for all three of us – in different ways, it had already been a big day for all of us.

After our walk and on our way back to Henry, we stopped in at the resort restaurant and booked in for dinner for tomorrow night, as we can take Mabi with us as well.

Once back at the bus and the power was back on, and the generator finally went silent – thank goodness!

We tried the aircon again.
Still no joy.

We found the reset button (hole) which we hadn’t been able to see earlier, and pressed it as per the manuals instructions.
Joyously – it burst into life!
…for around 20 minutes … then it died again.

The Tall One was messaging with the AirCon ‘tradie’ during all this, and after some inane responses initially (we know how to read a manual mate!) he stated that he thought it was a sensor and he’d fix it for free when we got home, to make up for the broken hatch.
We can work with that!

Awning down!

The Short One has a bit of a hard time doing up the screws on the awning arms, which became evident during one of the afternoon downpours when ‘her’ side of the awning collapsed amid a great crash and splash.
Sure scared the shit out of Mabi!
No damage done, and it was put back up by the Tall One, and screwed up nice and tight.
Phewwww…

But wait…

With yet another storm coming through, we did the now familiar rounds of checking all through-out Henry for any old or new leaks, and what we found is that the window area leak that we had thought was sorted was now upping the ante and had restarted – and once again the top part of our bed was saturated.

We stuffed some towels around the area, and for a while both of us just sat around veryyyy quietly, consumed by our own thoughts.
We were both a bit broken by this point…

A half hour later, and we looked at one another, realised we were on the same page with our thoughts, and jumped up and grabbed tape, oven bags and towel, and went to work making pathways for the water to follow, so that it would end up in the bags.

It was the best that we could accomplish with the tools we had, and the fact that that it was still belting down outside.
We were pretty proud of ourselves by the end of it!

Another day and yet another test thrown at us to see if we can manage on the road when everything goes to shit; without being awful to each other, or killing each other.
Again we survived.

Until next time – happy travels, and make the moments matter.

 

A/C on the fritz again!

 

the leak returns…

 

setting up water catchments

 

home-made burgers saved the day!