Day 77 (April 17) - Buxton

Judah's back after two days of midge! :(

Well we woke to another three very itchy people! 😟 Mim, Bek and Jude had all suffered fairly much from the midges. They are starting to look like they've gotten Chicken Pox!

Full sun on the solar blanket

13.5V x 2.9A =only 39W! :(

Yesterday and today I had the solar blanket out to charge the caravan batteries. One good thing about this location is that we have plenty of sun, which should mean plenty of charge for the batteries. It's a 120W blanket from Adventure Kings, yet despite it being in the full sun at midday, it was only generating about 2.9A of current and 13.5V. This calculates out to about 39W of power, which is a long way south of the maximum rated 120W. I figured if it's only putting out this little amount of power under these conditions, then is it actually working properly at all? I phoned the 4WD Supacentre helpline and they agreed with my assessment that it appeared to be faulty. Unfortunately the closest store is back down near Brisbane, and they don't do exchanges or refunds until they've assessed the unit which takes a couple of weeks at least. So we would probably need to order another one, have it shipped to the post office, then get the other one returned and just hope they agree it's faulty and give us a refund.


Mim and I had a chat during the morning about our options in relation to this site. We've booked (and paid) for three weeks, and despite the many nice things about this spot, on paper at least, it wasn't really working out as well as what we'd hoped. Obviously the midges are the biggest problem, but the muddy river bed isn't really quite as good as we'd hoped in terms of somewhere to go and swim to stay occupied while in isolation. We stayed on our 2017 trip at Miara, a little way north of Bundaberg, on the banks of Yandaran Creek, and that was similar to this in terms of the mud. So we kind of wondered if it might be like this; but we managed OK last time so we thought it'd be fine this time. And I guess we were; but it was just another negative. Now the issue with the solar blanket meant we may not have as much power as we hoped, and as we'd need to run the fans at night to keep the midges away.

So we started looking at alternatives and found the Woodgate Caravan Park just off the beach. We really wanted to stay in this general area if at all possible, and this was only about 7.5km away in a straight line, but a long way from any rivers. They confirmed they had never heard of any midges being an issue in their park. So we hoped it might be a better option. Plus it turned out the cost was only a couple of dollars more per night than we were paying Youcamp to stay here at Buxton! While we'd been quoted $30/night, by the time Youcamp's fees and insurance were added it the cost came to nearly $40/night. We did consider taking up an offer of accommodation we'd been offered back in Caboolture a few days ago, but felt we needed some more time just as a family to get some more routine back.

So we decided to take an afternoon drive out to Woodgate to check out the beach and caravan park and decide if it would make a good alternative. Even though it's only 7.5km away in a straight line, the round trip is about 40km because of a small tributary running between us and the ocean.

On the way we stopped at Mammino's icecream shop which, surprisingly, was open! This is one of a number of businesses who are staying open during the Covid crisis and are finding things challenging. Fortunately for them the Government's JobKeeper grant is allowing them to keep their staff on, but their big issue was inventory - they had two huge Easter show jobs booked in for which they'd made huge amounts of icecream, and of course these events had been cancelled. So they'd had to unload and shut down their freezer trucks and move all the stock into their giant on-site freezers, but of course they have way more stock than they need now. So we did our bit for the local economy! 😁 The little pots of icecream didn't look that big but they were delicious and perhaps even a little rich in some flavours, so we definitely felt satisfied. Between us we had:

• Red Dirt (Jaffa and Macadamia, a terracotta colour!)
• Golden Nugget (Macadamia, Butterscotch and Vanilla)
• Rum and Raisin
• Cookies and Cream
• Chocolate and Peppermint

The weather has been pretty warm, it was about 32 degrees so we were more than happy to down these lovely treats!

Woodgate looked lovely! There was a quiet esplanade running along the foreshore with the beach on one side and the caravan park on the other. There are a few shops along the esplanade, including a fish and chip shop and a post office. The water looked a little choppy as it was the afternoon, but it's protected by Fraser Island so it shouldn't be too bad.

The caravan park itself looked great! It was very empty - only 11 people staying here, in a park with probably 200 sites! There were loads of sites to choose from, power, water, toilets, laundry, and the beach only 100 metres away. For the sake of an extra $2/night it seemed a very good proposition, so we headed back to Buxton to try to make some arrangements to get a refund. The host was not particularly helpful unfortunately. He suggested moving to a different location about 100m away where we might get a bit more breeze, but having had so many bites so far we were really not too inclined to try many other options. He said because we'd gotten a cheaper rate and Youcamp had already taken their fees he couldn't give us a refund. I then contacted Youcamp, who said there was nothing they could do because they'd already released the money to the host so it was between us and the host. I guess we'll see how things work out.

-- Greg