The trip has ended now, we've done the full lap, but we're still going to head out on smaller trips in the future, and hopefully do another lap one day. This is why I've been so slack with the blog. Writing this last post puts a definite full stop on the trip..
The whole idea of doing the trip around Australia while we were young and mortgage free was so that we could go somewhere else like Europe for our grey nomad years where it wouldn't be so physically demanding.
That being said, after doing the trip all I can think about is getting back to the NT and west coast. So hopefully this is more of an ellipsis. There are already plans in the works to get back up to Darwin for territory day, so that's something.
Anyway, after hanging out with family in Tassie, we stuck around in Hobart for a bit, we went to the Taste festival, we did the mt wellington walk, we headed out and kayaked down the Picton river and then we headed up the east coast of Tasmania to Bicheno for new years, and to see the penguins coming to shore.
The boat 'Hot Prospect' coming in from the Launceston to Hobart. Most of the people we met at the boat club (Including Richard who let us stay at his place) were on this boat. They did pretty well apparently
These are some street performers who were down for taste festival. They were really happy and friendly guys
This was a really bad idea for new years, Bicheno was dead quiet, the only people on the beach were a few drunk teenagers... But the penguins were pretty cool, they were everywhere.
The locals are a bit ambivalent about them, some of them even complain because they nest under their houses and stink like fish. Being tourists though, we loved them..
Penguins making their way home from at Bicheno. They come in really late. Apparently if they don't come in after dark then seagulls and other birds will dive bomb them until they throw up the fish they caught
After Bicheno we headed over to mainland Australia again. We got in pretty late (about 7:30) and decided to drive all the way over to the east coast from Melbourne that night.
This would have been fine, except we haven't had to drive anywhere at night for a really long time.
After it started to get dark I put the headlights on and everything was fine, we drove for like an hour with no problems, then we noticed people were flashing us from behind.
Everything seemed fine from our end, but after stopping, the rear of the bus had no lights on at all, every park and brake light was out...
So we free camped in a really crappy neighbourhood for the night and then headed off the next day in daylight.
We eventually hit the east coast, and a really nice spot (mystery bay) in NSW and I managed to diagnose the problem.
It was actually two problems; the brake light switch had a plug at the bottom of it bumped loose somehow (that was easy to diagnose and fix, ...who knows how long we didn't have brake lights for...)
The parking light problem took AGES, following every wire, pulling apart the headlight switch and drawing up a wiring diagram for the circuit, in the end it turned out it was a bad connection in one of the fuses... I actually checked they were all working and there was no resistance across any of them, but didn't check they had connected across the terminals properly. Rookie mistake...
It was so simple, but took so long.. Its always the way. I think we hadn't had park lights since all the way back at Karratha when we had a bad earth. It shows how often we had driven around at night.
After Mystery bay we headed to Canberra. We went from batemans bay and headed up the steepest hill I have ever seen in the country. It just kept going up and up, it made the hills in the blue mountains seem like a joke. The bus handled it really well though. I'm super proud of her.
There we met up with one of Rachaels old friends and had a good weekend playing board games.
Then we headed (via the flat route) to my mum's place in the blue mountains to do some hardcore bus maintenance. The old girl has got a lot of scratches and chips on her journey and so she needed some tlc. We totally sanded the old girl back and resprayed her. We didn't bother using 2 pac this time and just went with enamel paint. Its less than a third the price, and if we have to respray her anyway after using 2 pac I figure why bother.
While we were there we lived it up for a while in the Blue Mountains as well, canyoning, liloing and bushwalking.
Then we headed up to the sunshine coast where I've started doing a PhD on sea sponges, which is really interesting. I'm really enjoying it, Its a strange feeling being excited to go to work every day. We'll see how long it lasts.
Now we're gonna stay on the sunshine coast for a while, and probably won't update the blog for a while until heading up to Darwin next. Its a pretty nice place, we've only been here a few weeks but we're both liking it alot.
Here's some photos;
Liloing down mount wilson river - A very nice trip
Climbing out of a cave in split rock near Lithgow
A rock slide on one of the canyon trips
The view from inside split rock - Its actually split into three sections but hard to photograph
Some glow worms inside on of the caves - I tried to take a photo of them all with the flash off but it wouldn't work...
My Mum Canyoning
Scmick looking new bus, with its brand spanking sr400 motorbike (a gift from my Mum) on the back. This photo doesn't do justice to the 2 weeks which were spent fastidiously sanding back every imperfection, chip and scratch in the buses paint before respraying it. She looks great now.
That is all for now.
As far as lemon news is concerned I've noticed a bit of an oil leak from the engine, only it doesn't come out of anywhere... its an intermittent leak which sprays the engine housing under load (but not always). I've been trying for ages to find out where its coming from but I can't figure it out.
I'm down to 2 options, its either through the threads of the bolts which hold the fuel pump on (which apparently often cause an intermittent leak like this in reconditioned red motors like ours (because they aren't sealed well after reconditioning)), OR its from the oil filter, for some reason there is a z303 filter on there, when it takes a z300! I'm not sure if it matters too much, they look the same, but the last mechanic to touch it might be at fault here (as usual).
More to follow in about 6 months I guess...
