BIG CHANGES ON THE HORIZON

Hey everyone, it’s been way too long since I blogged and I have no good excuse as to why. It’s time to update you all on what we have been doing, what we are up to now and about our future plans…………..

I’ll start with the beginning of the year where in March we came back to Rockhampton for a stay.  Fred went back to work at Q Mag and at that time was working as a casual.  With Mum being unwell at the Gold Coast I wanted to be reasonably close, so it seemed a good idea to put down stumps for a bit.  One thing led to another and after a couple of months Fred signed a contract for 12 months which means we will be in Rockhampton until May 2024.

We had signed up to volunteer at the Big Red Bash for our second year so at the end of June we hooked up the trailer and headed back to Birdsville.  This year was particularly exciting as not only were we going to the Bash again but we planned to spend 3 weeks trekking the Simpson Dessert.  To say we were excited was an understatement.  In a lead up to this and to be fair we had been talking about it for a while, we purchased a “new to us” Suzuki Jimny.  “Tarzan” was jungle green and joined our family from Sydney.  It was in Tarzan that we camped our way across the Simpson Dessert.  Well, we fell in love, having the time of our lives and we vowed that we would definitely being doing more travel on tracks and terrain that wasn’t particularly suited to our beloved De Busta.

So after many discussions, which for us generally happens in a very short time, we came to the big decision to sell everything and begin again.  Yep, our new Tarzan had to go, De Busta our beloved home had to go and our trailer.  In all honesty, I wouldn’t miss the trailer it was only a vessel to carry our car and bikes and I find driving the bus much easier without it. 

And so it began, within a week of deciding to make a change Fred had found a truck for us to buy.  We plan to continue the same lifestyle just in a different vehicle.  That vehicle will be an Expedition Truck.  So at the end of October we flew to Adelaide and picked up “De Trucksta” and headed back to Victoria. The plan was to get the roadworthy and register him and then drive back to Queensland for the build.  

Well most of that went to plan, except for the minor detail of no roadworthy so no registration.  Long story short, the tray on the truck wasn’t certified so required engineering to pass the roadworthy and we didn’t have the time or money at this point.  Lucky for us the previous owner was lovely and happily renewed the SA rego for 3 months to allow us to drive home.  While in Victoria we took the opportunity to empty our storage unit and after much culling, gifting and basically forcing our unwanted items onto friends and family, we drove home with a small load on the back.

De Trucksta is a dream to drive, once we worked out the gears.  We have 6 gears on De Busta and De Trucksta has 12 road gears and 12 off road gears with a split box and split diffs.  What could go wrong, you can google anything right and we did.  We had a great uneventful drive back to Rockhampton, no run ins with the various States’ transport departments.

So for the technical stuff; De Trucksta is an ex army 2002 Scania P114 AWD truck.  Three steps to climb into the cab, it’s like being on top of the world.  It has 2 axles so I don’t need a new licence as my MR is fine and has a 15 tonne GVM.  With a 340hp motor we can actually use cruise control and sit on 100km/hr easily plus as a bonus we climb most hills with ease now as well.  You could say we are chuffed with our new baby.

What are we up to now? We have removed and sold the tray that came with De Trucksta and Fred is busy building a subframe to attach to the chassis to allow us to attach our new home.  I guess in a sense you could say we will be like a snail with our house on our back.  We have a lot of ideas and plans and things are underway.  I will blog again soon to showcase our plans and the build.

Stay tuned…….