Planning

Aaaaaargh!  Feels very surreal to be saying 4 weeks to go until we hitch up the camper and head west for 7 or so months on the road!!  Aaaaargh – soooooooo much to do before then!  However, we are getting there. Only 5 more days at work left for me, 14 more shifts left at work for Matt.  The kids have their last swimming lesson tomorrow. Our container arrives early next week along with backup in the form of my Mum who will spend a week with us hopefully getting us all moved out of our house and everything clean and ready for our tenants who have signed on the dotted line for a twelve month lease!!  Welcome to the Samford Road crew, Van Schoor family!

Bonfire and roast dinner to welcome the soon to be new residents of ‘our house’.

The Samford Road kids! Don’t mess with them!

Matt has been super busy this last month, putting in lots of overtime at work, making a bizzilion phone calls chasing down car/camper parts and spare tyres, insurance quotes, changing our mobile phones over to Telstra so hopefully we get better coverage while we’re travelling, and organising our home removal/container for storage.  It’s all made for a pretty crazy last few weeks!

Goofing around – showing off our new first aid kits and spare tyre rubbish bag!

We’re really excited (I know – excited about a rubbish bin?!?!?) about our new ‘Bushranger Wheelie Bin’ which goes on the back of the spare tyre on Peter Prado.  We’ve wanted one of these for ages as we are always looking for somewhere to keep all our rubbish locked away from wildlife when camping, especially in National Parks where rubbish bins are not provided and you have to take all your rubbish out – as a five member family we are able to generate far too much rubbish over a week of camping which usually must be stored in the back of the car (very smelly!) until we come across a bin to dispose of it all!  We got a great discount on our First Aid kits from Give Life Center for being members of the MySwag forum.

Matt has also spent two seperate days as an apprentice mechanic learning how to service the car and the camper this month.  I was a little nervous that Matt had pulled the car apart and couldn’t put it back together when he had been gone for 10 hours on the day he serviced the car – but many thanks to ‘talktotheroo’ from Prado Point who spent the day showing Matt the ropes and sending both Matt and the car home in one piece!  Last week we added a  snorkel to Peter Prado – we’re looking bush ready now!!

Peter Prado’s new bling – a snorkel!

Karen Camper is now sporting new brakes and bearings, and has been greased all over after a day spent at Caboolture Caravan Repair.  Many thanks to Adrian there who again allowed Matt to be on the tools for the day.  Matt has learnt so much from those two days and we are feeling much more confident that we can deal with any small mechanical issues that we may come across as we travel.  A trip back to Russell at Kedron Car Electrics sorted out all the brake/lights etc issues – many thanks Rus!

Karen Camper at the Caravan ‘Day Spa’ – getting a service!

The packing/clearing out continues – we have to be out of our house by the 25th of May so the countdown is really on!  I came back from a night out at bookclub a few weeks ago to find our lounge gone – so Gumtree is doing its job!!!

Trailer load off to the dump – very liberating feeling!

Now we just need to sell our little ‘Haris the Yaris’ who is providing our petrol money for the trip.  Anybody know somebody who needs a great first car or family runabout??

For Sale – Haris the Yaris http://www.gumtree.com.au/s-ad/camp-mountain/cars-vans-utes/2010-toyota-yaris-5-door-hatchback-still-under-warranty/1017844289

And just proof that the kids are still alive – we haven’t given them away yet!  So, we’re getting there, we just want to get on the road now!!!

Fealy kids still smiling despite their tired and stressed mum and dad!!

Yesterday marked the start of the ‘8 weeks until we head off around Australia’ countdown!  I have to admit the stress levels are really starting to rise!  The ‘To Do’ list and the ‘Things we Need’ list just seem to be getting longer and longer rather than shorter!!  Not helped by the fact that we went away camping for two nights this weekend and we still don’t seem to be able to access the water in one of the water tanks on the camper, the camper brake controller plug, running lights, brake lights etc have stopped working and the camper fridge is still not working properly on the 12 volt when hooked up to the car – grrrrrrr!!!  Looks like a trip to the auto electrician is on the cards for this week.

Anyway – one day at a time I guess – I feel like we are not going to be ready but we will be heading off anyway so we just have to keep plugging away at the jobs lists!

On a positive note – we have ‘ticked’ a few things off over the last month!

No 1.

We now have tenants to rent our house and a date for our moving out (May 24th)!  It seems the stars have aligned and we have been lucky enough that friends of ours are going to move in.  We hope that Bernadette, Henrico and Mily will love it here as much as we have and we know that they will probably take better care of our house then we do!!!

No 2.

The Blog is up and running and inundating everybody’s email boxes on a pretty regular basis.

No 3.

We have pretty much sorted out the kids schooling.  After much deliberation we have obtained a ’12 month exemption from schooling’ for the kids with the approval from our current school principal.  This means that we will not be enrolling the kids in any formal schooling but rather focusing on what they will learn on the road and on some materials that we take with us (many thanks Mel for all the resources you have put together for us – very handy having a teacher as a friend!), along with utilising online resources such as Reading Eggs, Mathletics and other iPad Apps.  The kids teachers have been really supportive and we will be meeting with them before we head off to discuss what else we can do to help the kids along.

No 4

Matt has successfully been selling our unwanted household items left, right, and centre on ‘Gumtree’ www.gumtree.com.au

No 5

The roof racks and awning are now on the car.  These were a pretty cheap set from ‘Tigerz11’ http://www.tigerz11.com.au  so we are hoping that they go the distance!!  They are a bit dodgy looking and feel that way too, but so far we are happy with them for the price we paid.

A big thank you to Michael from ‘Prado Point’ for coming out and helping Matt to install the roof rack and awning!

Tobes & Matt tested the new awning out after dropping Jack off at Scout camp.

No 6

We have installed our drawers system into the back of the Prado.  Matt will have to give you the detail on those but I must admit they are pretty useful and I am glad that Matt convinced me that we needed to have them – I’ve already found them great for when doing an Aldi shop – everything can just get piled in the drawers instead of rolling around the back of the car!

Drawers in – Fridge Slide not yet bolted in – it’s on the list!

No 7

The packing has begun.

Yuck – packing!

I have obtained some boxes from work (thanks BMR!) and starting tomorrow I am packing at least one box per day in the hope that it will not become too overwhelming in May!  So be warned – if you come to visit this month you may be asked to fill a box!!

I guess we’re getting there slowly, slowly.  The kids on school holidays, a migraine and a few days camping this week have probably slowed the progress on the list ticking a little, but we will try to make some better headway this week!  Hope you are all well – I will have a few more interesting posts with some photos of our school holiday fun later this week.

Warning: Looooooong Post!  The idea was to update this blog as we made these decisions as separate chronological posts, now I have to cover it all retrospectively, so grab a cuppa and dive right in!

Originally we had planned to get the camper first, give ourselves time to pay it off, and then get the 4wd. I guess this was where we learned our first lesson, tow ball weight.

We had ‘Graham Grandis’ (Mitsubitshi Grandis 7 seater van) at this time

and while the Grandis had an 1800kg tow rating, it had a ridiculous 45kg ball weight limit. Working on the general rule of thumb that the ball weight will be approximately 10% of the camper weight, there was absolutley no way we were going to be able to buy and safely tow home/use a camper while we had the Grandis.

As you can imagine, I was pretty upset about ‘having’ to go and buy a 4bee! I had already made a short list for when the time came, I was looking at, in order or preference:

1. Nissan Pathfinder

2. Toyota Prado

3. Mitsubishi challenger.

In my heart I wanted the Prado, but, we could buy a brand new fancy pants Pathfinder with swanky heated leather seats and all sorts of bells and whistles, for the price of a 4-5 year old Prado (bloody Toyota tax!) The Challenger was really only in the list as a baseline to keep the accountant happy. (See, I tell her the price of the Challenger, and she can deal with it, I then down sell it and how for only $xx all those issues can be sorted by stepping up to the Prado/Pathy)

I test drove a brand new ST-L Pathy, and yeah sure, all the bells and whistles are cool, but to be honest, I found it was ‘not my cup of tea’ to drive. It was pretty clear that the Pathys are based on the Navara drivetrain, it felt very big, very cumbersome and everywhere I looked I saw blind spots (can you ‘see’ blind spots? If a tree falls in a forest…..?) Also starting to look at the availability of spares on the road, the multitude of electronics involved and the Pathy was beginning to lose it’s sparkle.

So it was time to seriously consider buying a car that would be older then the one we already had, also a good chance of having almost double the amount of klm’s for a good $15,000 more then what we could sell the Grandis for! Something just didn’t add up!

Anyway, off to test drive a Prado. 1st was a Petrol 120Series (because they are just so much cheaper). Well, I just loved it from the second I drove it 100mtrs down the road, somehow it felt no bigger then the Yaris, everything was where it should be on the dash and it was so nimble (considering it would still be an every day run about for Jess and the kids to school, shopping centres etc)

I did some figures on the fuel consumption under tow and it became pretty clear that the diesel was going to save us considerable money in the long run (approx 19L/100 petrol vs 14L/100kms diesel). This was based on getting one of the the post October 2007 Diesel Prados when Toyota introduced the new ‘D4D’ engine with considerably better power/torque and economy. It was time to down sell the petrol and up sell the diesel to the accountant.

After considerable research, and watching the market for a number of months, I started calling and making ridiculous offers for available Prados virtually anywhere within 500klm of Brisbane. Reality set in and we were beginning to think that while we have come up with the right car for our requirements, we were simply not going to be able to afford one. I extended my range to anywhere in QLD and NSW and we found a Dec 2007 120Series D4D Prado waaaaay out in Alpha QLD.

Turns out Jess’ parents happened to be baby sitting a station in Moranbah at this time, ‘only’ about 5 hrs away. “Nah” I said to Jess, “we can’t ask your mum and dad to drive over 400klms just to look at a car we might not even buy”. “Just call them and see” Jess said.

Well, I got a hold of Stewie and thought I would just ask the question. The conversation when something like this:

Me: “Hey Stewie, how’s things, how’s the Station?”

Stewie: “Yeah, not bad, getting a bit bored”

Me: “Hey we found a car in Alpha that might be a go-er……you don’t feel like a drive do you?

Stewie: “Yeah sure we’ll go and have look if you like”

Me: “Are you sure? Well let me get an address and find out when they might be free and I’ll give you a call back in about an hour yeah?

Stewie: “Ok”

Well, I spoke to the owner, got an address and called Stewie back in about 20mins…

Stewie: “Hello”

Me: “Geez it’s noisy there, where are you?”

Stewie: “On the way to Alpha”

Seems after 2 weeks out in Moranbah any excuse for a change of scenery was all Stewie needed and he was out the door and on the road!

Well, Myra and Stewie, we can’t thank you enough, because that was how we found Peter Prado. They collected him from Alpha a week later and drove him all the way back to Brisbane (We did have to pry the keys from Myra’s hands when she got here!)

So he arrived in virtually stock condition, other then the factory bull bar, the set of SandGrabba floor mats, full set of sheepskin seat covers and 5 x Brand new Yoko Geolandars, it was stock. I will do another post on the modifications we have now made, this post is plenty long enough, congratulations to all 2 of you that made it to the end (Mum because you are mum, and Jess because she had to proof read it!)