From Nambucca Heads we continued on our way south towards Sydney. Packing the trailer up in the morning I had felt a little lethargic, but assumed that it was a side effect of the strong painkillers that I was taking for my shoulder. Later in the day it became apparent that I had picked up a bug of some sort. We hadn't planned exactly where we were going to stop for the evening, and as it got later and later and I was feeling worse, the temptation was there to just book into a hotel somewhere. However we made it to Hawk's Nest where there was a North Coast Holiday Park at Jimmy's Beach. It was getting quite late and it was going to be dark soon, but the thought of paying $120 for a room versus $25 for a site, made up our minds to set up camp. Although I was fast developing a condition where I would have happily paid $200 just for a toilet pass...
Even though we only pitched the main tent, and left the awning and floormat, it was completely dark by the time that the tent was up and ready for Jake to go to bed. During the trip there were several times where Ness and I commented on how fast the sun goes down - it might have been because there were several times where we were pitching camp very late in the day. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to have a couple of beers and some leftover camp oven stew at this point. That night I had to go to the loo so many times that I can still remember the lock code for the toilet door. On the bright side, my frequent trips past some of the neighbours, made us some new friends in the form of Shey and Shey, a couple from Alice Springs. They had gone out there from Sydney looking for a change and loved the remoteness of the place - we were almost convinced to change our plans and head to Alice. BTW, the beers were worth it :)
The next morning we packed up fairly quickly so that we could make it into Sydney before the traffic got too bad. With so much freedom to do what we wanted to, when we wanted to... we hadn't realised that we were heading into Sydney on a bank holiday weekend Friday afternoon.
The level of driver aggression on the roads was quite a shock to our very relaxed frame of mind. To a degree this has left a mark and has influenced some of our decisions later on.
It was great to see Ian, Steph, and baby Zara though, who put us up while we were there. Ian and I go way back, and seeing them again was one of the things that I had been looking forward to the most. Unfortunately, shortly after arriving there my bug got worse and we weren't able to do some of the things that Ian had planned for us. I did manage to pull it together enough to go for a braai (bbq) at Ted's place - you can't beat a braai with old mates! For some reason I didn't take any pics of them!? Perhaps because they are so familiar.
Another highlight of the trip was seeing some of my family again that I hadn't seen since our previous trip to Australia several years ago. Along with our mates, they would dearly like to see us settle in Sydney (while our early plans were to eventually settle in Brisbane). I particularly enjoyed going through some old photo albums of our family when I was still very young. It was also quite funny when one of the kids commented on our truck "Look! A real four ex four!" :)
While we were there I also wanted to take some time to do a bit of work on the truck. It had developed a rather worrying noise in the suspension when turning at full lock, and I wanted to sort this out before whatever it was failed entirely. I checked and double checked all the suspension and steering components, but couldn't find any play in the components or tell-tale marks in the rust and dirt anywhere. Eventually I decided that it had to be the aftermarket CV joint that I had fitted on the right when I was trying to cure another clunk noise several months before - at the time I wasn't that happy with the design of the seals on the replacement part, and now thought that maybe muddy water had gotten in there and lead to a premature failure. Rather than change the outer CV joint again like I did before, I bought an entire drive shaft which is a lot quicker to swap but requires the diff oil to be drained and replaced (not a bad thing on an offroad vehicle that has spent time driving through mud and water). Repco supplied the replacement for $300 with a 5 year warranty. It then turned out that the residents of the very affluent Maroubra street where we were staying would not take kindly to someone doing vehicle repairs on the road. Fortunately Glen (a member of the Pradopoint forum) very kindly offered for me to do the work at his place. At the very last minute just as I was about to pull the wheel and drive shaft off to do the swap, it occurred to me that this was a lot of work based on a guess... and that I wasn't entirely sure that it was the right side CV that had failed. It could also be the left one!? So we jacked the front wheels of the ground and tried to replicate the noise by turning the steering from lock to lock. This is where I formulated Et's corollary to Murphy's Law: Anything that you want to go wrong, will not go wrong when you want it to. No matter what we tried we could not replicate the noise - driving in circles, driving in circles over curbs, driving backwards in circles over curbs with the diff locks on... Eventually I gave up and decided not to change the drive shaft at that point - I ended up carrying that spare drive shaft around with us all over Australia.
With me not feeling that well we didn't really get out much in Sydney (or take any pics), but we did take a day trip down the coast and through the Royal National Park, ending up in Kiama for lunch. While we were there we also went down to take a look at the blowhole which was well worth seeing.
On our last day there, Ian and Steph took us for breakfast down on the beach, where we bumped into the Geordie Shore crew getting to grips with their hire camper. Ness was very keen to go over and say hello, but having watched a few of their car crash telly episodes I was a bit more reluctant - I was certainly a lot more excited when I bumped into Rod Kerr from Bondi Rescue a few minutes later.
Hopefully it won't be so long before I do the next installment, and I promise there will be more pics. There is a lot of good stuff to come.
While we were there I also wanted to take some time to do a bit of work on the truck. It had developed a rather worrying noise in the suspension when turning at full lock, and I wanted to sort this out before whatever it was failed entirely. I checked and double checked all the suspension and steering components, but couldn't find any play in the components or tell-tale marks in the rust and dirt anywhere. Eventually I decided that it had to be the aftermarket CV joint that I had fitted on the right when I was trying to cure another clunk noise several months before - at the time I wasn't that happy with the design of the seals on the replacement part, and now thought that maybe muddy water had gotten in there and lead to a premature failure. Rather than change the outer CV joint again like I did before, I bought an entire drive shaft which is a lot quicker to swap but requires the diff oil to be drained and replaced (not a bad thing on an offroad vehicle that has spent time driving through mud and water). Repco supplied the replacement for $300 with a 5 year warranty. It then turned out that the residents of the very affluent Maroubra street where we were staying would not take kindly to someone doing vehicle repairs on the road. Fortunately Glen (a member of the Pradopoint forum) very kindly offered for me to do the work at his place. At the very last minute just as I was about to pull the wheel and drive shaft off to do the swap, it occurred to me that this was a lot of work based on a guess... and that I wasn't entirely sure that it was the right side CV that had failed. It could also be the left one!? So we jacked the front wheels of the ground and tried to replicate the noise by turning the steering from lock to lock. This is where I formulated Et's corollary to Murphy's Law: Anything that you want to go wrong, will not go wrong when you want it to. No matter what we tried we could not replicate the noise - driving in circles, driving in circles over curbs, driving backwards in circles over curbs with the diff locks on... Eventually I gave up and decided not to change the drive shaft at that point - I ended up carrying that spare drive shaft around with us all over Australia.
With me not feeling that well we didn't really get out much in Sydney (or take any pics), but we did take a day trip down the coast and through the Royal National Park, ending up in Kiama for lunch. While we were there we also went down to take a look at the blowhole which was well worth seeing.
On our last day there, Ian and Steph took us for breakfast down on the beach, where we bumped into the Geordie Shore crew getting to grips with their hire camper. Ness was very keen to go over and say hello, but having watched a few of their car crash telly episodes I was a bit more reluctant - I was certainly a lot more excited when I bumped into Rod Kerr from Bondi Rescue a few minutes later.
Hopefully it won't be so long before I do the next installment, and I promise there will be more pics. There is a lot of good stuff to come.
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