Practise…. what have we learnt?

Posted by efloow on June 17, 2015 in Background | Leave a comment

Our vast experience of camping began 18 months ago with the purchase of our Swan.  It has been an interesting and steep learning curve… a few long weekends up and down the coast, culminatng in 2 weeks in Kangaroo Island has us feeling, perhaps falsely, confident about the next seven months.   What follows are some of the things that we have learnt.

• The awning is not windproof… it flys away with a strong 30 knot southerly change at 2am!  However, this error did justify changing the clunky Jayco Awning (below), to the fancy Fiamma wind up one!
• Camping on the coldest night in Sydney in a decade was not the best idea.  We thought we ought to practice for the cool nights in central Australia in July, but got more than we bargined for.  Minus 2.5 degrees at 6am, and one very cold and sleepless night.   But thankfully, by 9am it was back to nearly 20 degrees!
  
• Do not move the trailer with the roof up, even if the ground 10 meters away looks more level and inviting.  It is expensive  to replace struts that support the roof that bend as you go over the bumps!  Not to mention the anxiety around how to raise or lower the roof with bent struts as dusk arrives, or the strong words that were exchanged in relation to the decision to move of location despite the fact that we were the only people in a 3 hectre field.
• Less is most definately more.  We bought all but the kitchen sink for the first trip.  Each time we learned to take half the junk that we did on the previous trip.  It is terrifying how little you actually need.  The best suggestion we heard, which we ignored, was to put a red sticker on everything and only to remove it when we used the item, then don’t take anything on the next trip that had still got a sticker on it!
• Towing with the trailer brake on for 500 km is possible, and remarkly seemed to do very little damage except to pride.  I suspect that the fact that it was bucketing down for most of the trip minimised the damage.
• Camping in idyllic road side spots comes recommended, but it is important to remind yourself when awoken from a deep slumber by the rattle / shudder / shaking and roar of an approaching road train, that it is not the knights of the apocalyse coming to take you away!

The rest of our learning was less eventful.  As a family we did a few weekend courses; 4 wheel driving and recovery, off road towing, and sand driving (at Stockton beach).  The guys at Getabout (http://www.getabout.edu.au) where amazing… insightful, helpful and personalised advice on absolutely everything.

I also did a bush mechanics course, again with Getabout.  I can now take a tire off it’s rim and change it for a new one, fingers crossed.  I also learnt on this course that there is nothing to fiddle with in the Discovery; if it decides to give up the ghost we are in trouble.  Too many electronics and bits locked away to allow for an amateur without a computer to play with!