Blog 23 – One Week to D Day 

It’s so bloody exciting, we hit the road this Saturday 1st June for a 4 month adventure.  We will be bashing, visiting the desert again, hitting up the Flinders Ranges, visiting where Mad Max was made and more.  Unlike our previous travels, neither of us will be working this time so we will be free to do whatever we want.  I will be posting along the way to share our adventure.

The last couple of weeks have been spent doing the finishing touches and until you start you don’t realise just how many there are.  We booked a skip and cleaned up our build mess plus took the opportunity to do another cull of our belongings. Trust me when the bin was collected it was full to overflowing, I like value for money ha ha.

A big big worry was squashed when we got our truck registered finally.  Not that there were any issues, it just took a long time to get the roadworthy and mod plate.  All done and a trip to Queensland Transport and we are now officially able to roll.  Now that we are getting closer to hitting the road, Fred serviced the truck.  He was amazed to find the oil was still clean and 3 weeks later it still remains clean, we are amazed, a little confused, but happy as well.

Now for the small jobs, we started by securing the microwave and fridge to ensure they don’t move while we are travelling and to make sure that the doors don’t open up spilling our goodies all over the place.  The microwave had feet on it so it was pretty easy to build into a piece of wood and I finished it off with a baby proof lock.  The fridge turned out quite easy as well, Fred fabricated a piece that folds down from the top to secure the top doors and a small piece of wood placed in the freezer door handles, stops the bottom doors from opening.  

I always wanted under floor storage to take advantage of the vacant space in the subfloor.  Fred had been putting this off for a bit as it was a do or die project in that the cut out needed to be the right size as it would be the hatch.  There was no practicing by cutting it smaller at first and then enlarging as we go.  Well as the other jobs dried up, he had no option but to give it a crack and what a job he did.  They turned out fantastically and I now have secret hidey holes for important stuff like wine maybe wink wink.

After cutting out the majority of the drawer in the kitchen bench to allow the sink to sit in, Fred then weaved his magic and turned the remaining space into 2 ripper drawers and I am able to fit all my cutlery, utensils and knives in there.  I then cut out foam in the other drawer to secure our coffee cups and bowls to ensure they don’t hit together when travelling.

We had been waiting on our air conditioning unit for some time and it finally arrived.  Fred cut and shut to make it fit and attached the outside unit to the front of the habitat box up on the roof rack.  This was a bit of a job as the roof rack had been finished so we had to get it down off the roof to cut bits out to accomodate the size of the box, this took 3 goes and we were very happy to get it back up there for the final time – we hope.  He fitted the inside unit, running the piping and wires through the walls and we now wait the professional to vac and release the gas.  Nothing like cutting it fine, he is due on Thursday.

Much to Fred’s dismay, I requested that a camera be set up in the box so that I can keep an eye on things when we are driving.  After De Busta, where I was always on hand to shut a drawer, close a door, pick up something that fell down, I was a little nervous about getting to the other end and opening the door to find a disaster.  It paid off on our first trip as I had forgotten to lock the bike box and the door was merrily swinging in the breeze.  This reminded me that I needed to formulate a check list so the simple things don’t get forgotten.

So having a camera meant I had to have a monitor in the cab to watch what’s going on.  I thought it was timely to show you the cockpit of the truck, it’s a little bit busy lol!

Another addition is Starlink.  We have considered this for a while now and thought it was timely as we will now be travelling in more remote places.  We cancelled our Telstra mobile plans replacing them with prepaid Boost cards, much cheaper as we no longer need data and once we knew our Starlink was working, we cancelled our data plan.  Starlink is quite expensive on it’s own but the savings from cancelling all our plans actually saves us a bit, a very small bit, but it is a saving just the same and we should have coverage just about anywhere.

The last big elephant in the room is our bike box.  It looks huge but we are hoping to fit 5 bikes in there.  We decided that for this trip we don’t need all our bikes as a lot of our trip will be spent the dessert and we don’t have sand wheels lol!  But we did want to take our gravel bikes at least so we had to bite the bullet and try to work it out.  We have one, the heaviest and probably most awkward one in, so just 4 to go.  

Last weekend we had a reveal, just a posh way of saying a group of mates wanted to take a look so we figured it was easier to do it in one place.  We had a great morning catching up with friends and showing off our masterpiece.  We then packed up and headed off on our first little road trip to Headlow Creek.  To say we loved it is an understatement.  The truck went great, we had a fire and chilled out with a beverage beside a glorious creek.  What more could we want?

Stay tuned………….