Graeme’s Post

 
It’s always nice to start out with a nice photo – well, the photo is rubbish, but the car was worthy of a picture.
See how many different cars you can spot. I think there is at least 6 bits of car there!

Like most evenings on the road, I’m sitting watching the sun go down as I write this. What a life! So far the sun sets have been the best part of this trip. I was looking in awe at a map of Australia in the back of our touring atlas. We have covered so much distance it’s scary. Initially I was worried the car wouldn’t make it, but we’ve calculated we’ve done 5000KM. Hell, we did 800KM yesterday. It certainly doesn’t sound like much distance for a car (considering you service them every 10000-15000KM), but it’s really settled down and works great. Thinking about it, it’s unlikely the car has changed, but more our perception and tolerances. I’ve certainly narrowed down the noise the the drive shaft moving in the hub. I wish I could upload the video to explain how it looks and sounds. No idea how or why that might happen, but it’s fine, it’s only a noise when idling around occasional bumpy corners. It’s not going to pose a problem.
 

Tiny micro towns – what can I say. Cassie is far more vocal on this topic, but I really resent having to stop in these places. There seems to be no pride, no employment, no future for these towns. This unpowered rest stop has 3 times the facilities of the last town we passed through!  Maybe I’m just tired, we had a rubbish sleep last night. On the upside, we’re considering going to Fraser Island. We’re not super certain we will, but it seems a waste to just to head back inland when the coast route will be more interesting. We won’t make it tomorrow, but we’ll start to hit decent towns at least.

We have made a list of things to improve upon before our next trip. So far the list looks like this:
-Angle the drawer lock bolts to 45’ so that the bolts don’t vibrate out while driving. Currently they are horizontal.
-Permanent flyscreens.
-Tinting for privacy and reducing sun temp.
-Remove a centimetre or two from the top of the high drawer. This will make it easier to pull, and able to lock out like the rest.
-Dual batteries – It was a given, I now accept this is the best way forward. I’m sick of considering the temperature of the fridge if we leave the car for too long.*
-Make permanent the wiring for fridge, laptop charger, screen power & inverter. A nice fuse block/switch panel will do nicely.
-Toying with the idea of moving the laptop to the passenger side, rather than the common screen & laptop combination. This has several advantages:
1) Allows better entry of data while travelling without having to use on-screen-keyboard via touch screen.
2) Opens up the centre section of the dash allowing use of the middle vents and the instrument cluster that is currently covered (Oil pressure & battery state)
3) Looks more factory – sick of people asking why I have a ‘TV’ in my car.
4) Simplifies the docking & undocking when we want to take the laptop out of the car.
5) Frees up the space for something else.

-Buy another head torch.
-Consider better access to fresh water, currently we siphon from larger 20L jerry cans into 1-2L bottles.
-Invest in a small fold up table or devise a way to use some other flat surface we have (Such as the bed base)

 

*Currently we have somewhat of a dual battery in the form of an accessory jump pack, which gets charged off the car battery, but runs the fridge for a few hours until we run the car again. We want days of capacity, not hours.

 

 

Laptop is reaching it’s life…

-USB ports drop out (annoying when using broadband, or copying photos as it drops out roughly every 3 minutes)
-Car charger has is broken in two places (have been running the 240v power pack on the inverter)
-Screen bends over in the wind
-It’s out of disk space
-Doesn’t have grunt to play videos (let alone edit them)
-On the upside, it’s battery life is fantastic.