The Lemon

  It all started sometime in June when Rachael and I decided to buy a motorhome and travel around Australia. We'd been living apart for a while now while I finished my intern year in pharmacy and couldn't really decide on a place to settle afterward, so we figured we'd just travel around for a while until we found a good place.
We looked around for a while for a little hiace campervan but they were pretty expensive ($10000 +) for a reasonable one. Then we started to look at Toyota Coaster's converted to motorhomes and thought "Why not, some of these are around $10000 and are twice as big!!"  ... How naive we were.
 We didn't really shop around much, and just jumped on the first coaster conversion which was nearby, It was allegedly a 1982 coaster conversion which used to be a school short bus. After kicking the tyres there was no real rust on the body which seemed good and that was about the extent of my mechanical knowledge. The guy who was selling it seemed to like it and said it had a new engine in it so we were like, why not, we don't know what we're doing anyway. And bought it against the advice of everyone we knew.
 So we bought this piece of crap motorhome off this guy which turned out to be a 1972 model with a replaced but worn out engine. And a broken fridge, broken air conditioner, leaky roof, dodgy gas set up and some really dodgy wiring amongst other things.

 So for the next 7 months it was down to some pretty heavy duty renovating and repairing to get this thing in order. We had a hand at re-painting it and got bailed out by some friends at work who fixed it up.
 We put in a new engine, New fridge, Aircon, fixed any rust and made it livable inside.
 We also put a 120 watt solar panel on the roof and set up a little battery bank and a little inverter so it's like a little house. We also got a gas hot water shower and decked it out with so much crap that we can't fit much more in.
 Now we have a pretty classic motorhome which looks pretty good. It's pretty comfortable to live in and with some luck won't break down too often on it's way around Australia. Too bad if anyone is stuck behind us though, it is so slow now it's full of all our junk. We're gonna have to cull a lot of it on this trip and try and live a bit more minimalist for a while.

 For the last few days we've just been sorting out loose ends, I just sold my trusty car to a massive bogan in Kempsey. I felt pretty bad for it, but I had to say goodbye. Rachael moved all her junk out to her parent's, which was ages away, we had to drive about 1500 K's over the last 4 days getting from Coffs Harbour to Lithgow and back to Newcastle then back to Lithgow then back to Coffs harbour. And now tomorrow is the first day on our trip and we're already over travelling.
We're both a bit apprehensive about the journey, there's a lot which is gonna go wrong, but we're pretty good when we get into trouble and generally don't get at each other's throats.
 On the past 5 or so trips we've taken the lemon out, it has broken down on 3 of them. It has also broken down once when parked where I was staying, so the track record isn't good. We'll see how far we get tomorrow...