Hi Everyone,
Well it’s funny how things pan out.  We went to a Howard’s storage shop in Cannington last Thursday evening and met Tracey, who helped us out with some drawers and other storage ideas for the van.  We got talking and found out her husband builds off-road caravans.  Long story short, we needed our table to be a bit bigger, a new drawer put in and our drain in our shower looked at.  We popped in on Friday to see Dave at Elross Caravans and he said to bring in our van on Monday morning and he would help us out.  Joel dropped off the van at 7am and sure enough, the van was ready by lunchtime.  We went to pick it up and as Dave was bringing it out on the forklift, he noticed that the jockey wheel lock was quite bent and the steel lock was fractured.  So he set to work grinding off the old lock and welding on a new one, while we were there.  Absolutely one of the nicest and friendliest blokes we’ve met and we would recommend him and his business to anyone.  Thanks heaps Dave and Tracey for putting us in touch!  While we were there we noticed that the rear wheels on the tandem wheels were both scrubbing out on the outside of the tyres.  While we had the van en-tow we stopped at Care-a-van, who underslung the axles for us in November.  They had a quick look and said to bring it in tomorrow morning to have a proper look at it on the ramps. So another early morning tomorrow to drop off the van early, will see how that progresses.

As we wanted to get the van in early to Dave, we had decided to partially unpack the van (ie mattresses, bedding, clothes, etc) into the house (Joel’s mum and dad’s) and camp out in the loving room.  Looks like we’ll be spending another night in the house.

In between all of this, Joel and I decided that we needed to get this sat dish internet working or else there’d be no point in taking the bloody thing.  So we set it up and played.  After a few breaks, to pick up the van, etc, we finally managed to get the internet to work.  It’s set up through a sat dish, with programs on the laptop to set it up but the program was giving us elevations that were off.  Once we figured that out we were in business.  There was a lot of cursing and Joel did say, several times, that this is stupid and blah, blah, blah.  Perserverance is one of my strong points (that and i couldn’t let it beat me more like it) so re-read everything and tweaked all the settings on the laptop and the actual dish and vuola` it was working.  Sounds easy but by 5pm i was ready to throw the dish like and oversized frisbee into the great beyond too!  The kids think we are Gods because we have the internet again and after we went out for tea, they had showers and went online for a little while before bed.

Joel has been busy working on the van in the last few days as well.  The kids have lights above their beds but they were put in the corner and they can’t read in bed, so Joel has replaced them with 12v moveable lights.  He also put in 12v fans at the ends of their beds and ours as we spent a night at Coronation beach some months ago, where you’re not allowed to run the generators after 9pm.  We rocked up at 8pm and took Barney down to the water so we could all have a cool off but the van was very hot and stuffy.  It will be good to try out the fans when we get further north.

Now that the sat dish is working properly, Joel wants to mount the set-top-box, the modem and router in the van and put coaxial points on the outside, so we can pull up, set up and plug in the dish and if we stay for a few days can leave it set up without it getting knicked.  So looks like we’re off to the shops again tomorrow for cable and bits’n’pieces.  It’s very handy having an electrician on site! Will keep you posted as to how that goes.

Cheers for now

Ciao