Woah – Interesting day

Isn’t it ironic that of my last two 4wd’s, both of them have had problems with reverse lights. The previous one just had a dirty switch, and today when I dived under the car to investigate why our new troopie has recently lost it’s reverse lights, I found it has a broken connector on the switch. In fact, it was a little difficult to find as there was no cable leading to it, just the two bent pins sticking out. To save a couple of words, here is a video. It’s not real relevant or particularly interesting, but I make these videos to help other people. My last reverse light video has helped heaps of people. It’s got over 3200 views, with comments of people saying ‘thanks, I did what you did and my problem is fixed’ which is nice.

So another bit of awesome was the discovery that I appear to have a front diff lock. Normally I wouldn’t care so much, but I did want a front one for a very specific reason. In a previous post, I highlighted concern that Maxtrax work great as long as you can get them in front of a wheel that’s driving. 95% of the times you get stuck in a 4wd is when one rear wheel slips, AND one front wheel slips. A single diff lock (front or rear) eliminates this ‘cross axel’ loss of power. But ideally for us, not only do we not loose this drive, if we do get stuck, we can put the maxtrax in front of the front wheels and know they are both going to drive us out.

Oh, nearly forgot… I picked up our International Driving Permits today! Very exciting. It’s cool to see all the translations in the permit which show authorities how to read it in their language. I can’t help but ponder as to when we will use it. I BET we’ll get it our a minimum of five times. Everything I read suggests that foreigners get pulled over nearly every day. They just stop you out of interest, ask where your from, attempt to extort money out of us and send us on our way. Hopefully the IDP is one less thing they can pick us for.

And a tiny followup to the weekend, here is a picture or two of Wee Jasper and our camp ground. On the way back via Tumit, Gundagahi and Yass, we stopped and ‘smelled the roses’ at every opportunity. We took full advantage of the camper and had a rest outside of Yass rather than driving tired. A great luxury and safety feature I say!