“We Better Not Overtake Anyone Going Uphill..."

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Intended Departure Day, Still Packing

Departure day has been put off due to Mum's emergency pacemaker operation. But just heard her operation has been successful and Mum is having cup of tea, so that bodes well for leaving soon.

We have been packing the campervan... Getting worried that we will exceed the allowable weight limit. My crude method of working out if our weight is okay is to imagine we could, theoretically, have three children in the van. I figure :

  • Mark's speaker, guitar, stand, pedal board, and other miscellaneous singing things is equivalent to a normal size child.
  • The many bottles of wine constitutes a second somewhat chubby child.
  • The hundreds of pieces of glass, tools, grout, slate, cement, and boards for my mosaics is a very large obese teenager.

Loading up the van

One of the wine stashes

One of the mosaic stashes 

On top of our ‘hypothetical children’ (who bear no resemblance to our actual children), there is all the rest of the supplies that normal people take … gas, water, diesel, food, clothes, chairs, table, tools, batteries, solar blanket, spare tyre, bikes, etc. And, since its Mark, a satellite to connect to the internet. Hence why I am a little worried about the weight… 

Anyway, irrespective of its load, we are both a wee bit nervous about the van. When Mark and Suzy drove it from Albany to Perth last week, as they got onto the freeway about 40 minutes from Nedlands, black smoke started pouring out of the van. Other drivers were tooting and gesticulating to get Mark and Suzy to pull over. After a pause to let the smoke dissipate and to let me (travelling behind) know what was going on, Mark managed to nurse the van home, worrying about blown gaskets and other scary scenarios.

Next day, following calls to my brother and the help of a mobile mechanic, the problem was diagnosed as a hose that had come apart underneath. A trip to Bunnings to buy a new clamp, and now it is all fixed. Thanks to Warren for his spot-on diagnosis! But he has warned us that other hose pipes could do something similar and that we should take some spare clamps with us...

(Mark just walked in and said "with all that cement in there, we better not try to overtake anyone going uphill". Hence the title of this blog.)




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