The Roaming 5: Day 85 - 92 (April 25-May 2)

Hi again everyone!

Our time here at Woodgate has continued pretty well in the vein of the last post, but with a few variations. Here are the highlights.

Most mornings we've continued to go for a swim, and every few mornings we've got for a run first. It's been a lovely way to start the day. The waves have gotten better during this past week, and the kids have had plenty of opportunity to go body boarding! Mim and I have had plenty of time to float, relax and get some sun. Some days we've been for 2-3 swims, depending on the weather, and as it's only about 100m from our van to the beach it's been an easy break to take.

The COVID-19 lockdown has meant the area is very different from how it probably normally is, and this is probably the case everywhere. The whole district has been very quiet. The Esplanade has few cars, the beach which stretches a few kilometres in each direction has been pretty well deserted, with maybe only a couple of people in sight at most. The convenience store at the front of the caravan park, and a small cafe 20m away, have both remained open but obviously with minimal trade, so we've been there to support them a few times. They made a delicious fish and chips for us one night about a week ago, offering Barramundi, Flathead, Cod and Whiting - we tried them all and the Flathead or the Barra were probably our favourite but they were all good. On another occasion we stopped there for lunch and had some delicious wraps and milkshakes. They aren't the cheapest - the wraps were $10-$18 - but they were full of fillings and very tasty!

A council worker removing the hazard tape
from picnic settings near our swim spot

Yesterday was the first day some restrictions were starting to lift, and when we were out for our morning run some council workers were removing the hazard tape from the various picnic settings. Today things started to look different. There were probably a dozen people on the beach, including a group of four people walking. A few boats were on the water, including some small hovercraft! When we finished our morning swim, people were sitting on the picnic settings we normally just dumped all our stuff on when we went for a shower rinse off before our walk back. Several cars were parked outside the caravan park lining up for food at the cafe, and we had to wait for THREE cars to pass before we could cross the Esplanade and return to the park.

It's great that things are starting to get back to normal... in a way.... but it's also sad seeing the first signs that the quiet, peaceful world we've been able to enjoy for the past couple of weeks is starting to fade away. It has certainly been an unprecedented cameo of just how lovely the world can be when it's a quieter, more natural place, not so full of greed, commerce and activity. What a wonderful planet this will be when it's the habitation for God's kingdom on earth!

Green Tree Frog - definitely not a cane toad!

While we were with our cousins in Brisbane, the kids went 'cane toad busting' outside on a few evenings, and the trend has continued here. Cane toads are an immense pest up here, and we first learned about them in Kununurra (north east WA) on our last trip. They are continuing to spread across the top of Australia, and community groups are trying to educate people on how to identify and get rid of them when you discover them. We don't feel particularly fond of the idea of whacking these creatures with sticks, but it is an effective way of killing them and saving the native wildlife which these pests so easily eat or poison when they themselves are eaten. On one outing the kids found this beautiful green tree frog, which obviously wasn't 'busted'!

Mim and I got some business work done on some days, and the kids got school work done too. I still had some hassles dealing with the problems from the last place, so there have been emails to send and a couple of phone calls to make. What is surprising is just how busy we've been! This must be what retired people say about retirement! There's been no sitting around twiddling thumbs and feeling bored - there is always something to be doing. Obviously we still have business work to do and that is really never-ending... but I somehow thought things might be a little more leisuresome than it's been at times!

Family Meeting

Our family meeting had some fun moments!

We decided around April 25 it would be a good idea to have a family meeting. There were various little things we felt needed addressing, and thought it would be good to share some of these, as well as to have the opportunity to give each other some honest feedback about things we're doing well and not so well.

So we made two worksheets to guide this discussion. The first sheet was one Tim and Kate Badger had used for their family, and I think we used this either verbatim or with very minimal modification. We completed this one first. Once we'd done that, we then handed out the second sheet. Each person had a sheet of their own, and on this there were places for the four other family members to each write up to five things they loved about the other person, and up to three things they would like them to work on. This sheet was then folded in such a way that no-one could see anyone else's comments, and the sheets were then passed around the table for us each to complete. We then reviewed what others had said, and all felt they wanted to share the results, which in some cases was very humourous! But it was really really good feedback, and something which we will, in the last stage of our meeting (as we ran out of time!) take back to our first worksheet and use to guide the individual goals we want to work on in the months ahead.

Fishing

We also embarked on a number of interesting, but ultimately unsuccessful, fishing trips in the last week. Having gotten the rod and lures from Hervey Bay last week, plus some bait we had already, we tried in a number of spots. A couple of kilometres north from our spot is the mouth of the Theodolite River, and about five kilometres south is the mouth of the Isis River. We had some fun for sure - all of us apart from Bek caught something across about four different outings we had, but nothing we could keep, and given the time we spent on the exercises it wasn't really a success.

At the southern end of Woodgate Beach there is a beach entrance where it's possible to drive onto the beach and then all along the beach down to the Isis River. We had a good explore along the beach, managed to not get bogged, and two of our expeditions were down into this area. The kids also got to do some canoeing in the Isis River and paddled out to the sandbars.

Pajero Lighting

Normal high beams

Spotlights plus light bar.

I've also been working on the light bar / spotlights on the Pajero, even though I thought this project was finished in Brisbane. Of course the light bar was mounted fine in Brisbane, but as I said in the last post we weren't that impressed with its straight-line performance.

The light bar is trying to do two jobs - it has a telephoto section in the middle for centre illumination, and a wide angle light on either side to show up any wildlife on the sides of the road. The spotlights are really mainly a centre beam with less on the sides. At least that's how they're each marketed.

This is the light bar I bought, and these are the spotlights.

The mounting on the front of the car was designed just for the light bar, so I had to so some modifications to fit spotlights too. I added the extension piece I bought last week so we could mount the light bar and the spotlights at the same time, so for a few days I'd work on something during the day, we'd all take the car out during the evening to test it and align the lights, and then make any necessary mods the next day before repeating the process that night.

One of the challenges is that the mounting for the lights is not particularly rigid - it's just a piece of aluminium angle which is secured to the plastic bumper bar, and while two fixings do go into metal, the other two are just into plastic (all fixing have a section of metal on the other side for the screws to screw in to). This means the structure, and thus the degree of wobble of the light assembly, is dictated by the rigidity of the front plastic bumper bar, which is not designed to be completely rigid, so isn't ideal but is all we could manage without shelling out for a nudge bar or bull bar.

Spotlights on their own

Spotlights plus light bar. Note marginal improvement
in edge illumination with light bar.

For the light bar, it's not particularly a problem, because its low shape means it has a low centre of gravity and thus it doesn't wobble too much. Also, because it doesn't really reach any further than the normal high beams, the main benefit of the light bar is its side illumination, and being floodlights with soft edges you tend not to notice any slight movement. By contrast, the spotlights are quite directional, so any movement is going to be more obvious (which is why a laser pointer with its ultra-focused beam seems to wobble about so much when a presenter is using it during a talk - any wobble is very obvious when the beam is very precise and travels some distance from the source). But of course with the spotlights, since they are taller and heavier they are more liable to wobble too - wobble which moves the whole bracket, and the more weight you add to the assembly the worse the wobble is going to be.

I tried various combinations and various ways of mounting the different combinations to try to get the best compromise, and in the end decided that the light bar was really not adding enough value and removed it. Its telephoto section was already no better than the Pajero's high beams, so it certainly added nothing straight ahead, and he wide-angle section was only a small improvement on the fall-off of the spotlights (which actually had more side illumination than I expected).

I decided I'd stick with the spots for a little while, and then if I need to I can just add some small auxiliary flood lights to provide side illumination. This would probably be a less heavy and less wobbly option, and would also work better with the spots in the centre and the side floods on the side (rather than the reverse as I had to do to get it all to fit in).

Bible Readings

On our last trip we had finished 2Chronicles and the time of the kings of Israel and Judah, so on this trip we continued on with Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther for our 'morning' reading in the car, and were going through John as our evening reading. The 'daily readings' have been a feature of Christadelphian family life for a long time, and it's something I did when I was younger, and Mim and I did early in our marriage. As we started having kids, we obviously found we couldn't do all three with them, so we did a single one and helped them through it, but this is what ended up being it. This was never my intention, but with life being busy, being tired, the kids not being able to follow all three and so on, it was easy to accept this as the best we could manage at the time. As the kids got older, we reviewed it from time to time. A few years ago we tried to do one reading in the morning with breakfast but found it was too rushed and the impending school bus arrival and my departure to work meant it really didn't work. We continued to feel it would be better to do one properly than rush through all three just for the sake of it.

However it's always been in my mind that I would like to return to all three at some point, and I felt that, while the argument that "it's better to do one properly than three for the sake of it and learn nothing" sounded valid, there was a lot to be said for the overall familiarity with the scriptures one gets when doing all the readings. By doing a more detailed coverage of just one reading, it means that it might take a few years before you ever revisit the story and refresh yourself on exactly what's where. I recalled times in my late teens / early 20's when I was sticking closely to the pattern, I would sometimes come home from a youth group activity and not get to bed until around midnight and I'd wonder what the point was of doing a reading when I was so tired - but was often surprised at what I discovered when I made the effort, even when conditions were far from ideal. But in our daily life, it just always seems too busy or some reason why we couldn't.

So while we were on this trip, we decided that there must be something wrong if we couldn't get the three readings done in this situation, when we have basically zero time-bound responsibilities, zero external deadlines, and no good reason in the world why we can't do it. If we can't do it here then when would we ever be able to do it? We wondered if the kids would be able to manage it, if we ourselves would be able to rise to the challenge too.

So shortly after our arrival at Buxton we decided to start all three readings, and we've continued it through here. And I have to say it's been a fantastic experience! We are now three weeks into our habit and we have all managed quite well. I have been surprised how well the kids have adapted to it. There are no complaints of "it's too long", "I'm bored", "do we have to do another one" etc etc etc that I was worried about. We do one reading straight after breakfast. We had intended to do the middle one after lunch, but this hasn't worked always as we've often been out and about during the day (e.g. fishing, shopping etc). The third one we do after dinner, sometimes with the second one if we missed that. We got behind a week or so but managed to catch up. And I think it's helped all of us.

One of the reasons we did this trip was to try to build a stronger love of each other and of God, so this is definitely one habit we want to retain when we get back. The challenge of course will come once the pressures and deadlines of normal life come back, but at least we will be in the habit of it when we get there!

Caravan Power Supply

A few nights ago, the 12V power supply and battery charger for the caravan suddenly died with no warning. As we're thankfully at a caravan park, most of our things were running directly off the 240V so we could continue to use all those (fans, laptops etc), and the power supply was only providing 12V for the lighting and a small drinks cooler. But it meant we could only run the caravan lighting from the batteries, and the only way we could recharge the batteries now was from the solar blanket (which itself isn't working properly!).

The supply is a Setec ST35 II, and from searching it turns out these supplies do fail from time to time, and unfortunately they are no longer available new! I pulled it apart and had a decent look at it, but there were no telltale signs of what had failed. And without a circuit diagram or a decent soldering iron it was going to be difficult to attempt component-level repair. Also, as it's a 4-stage charger, there were lots of microchips inside which would be impossible to test. So there was the very real possibility that if I even managed to pull everything out, draw out the circuit diagram, and even identify the faulty part, I may not be able to find a replacement and the whole exercise would be in vain. So I wasn't too inclined to start.

There are plenty of aftermarket chargers available, which sound to do a better job at actually charging the batteries than this original version, however it wouldn't be a simple plug-and-play solution and would require a new fuse box and other modifications which aren't going to be so easy on the road. So this wasn't my preferred option

The manufacturer is still available in Melbourne and offered a reasonable $130 repair. But there would be a 4 week lead time which would be a challenge since we will almost certainly have relocated at least twice in the next month. So this wasn't ideal.

I did have a small piece of success with Dario Caravans in Adelaide, whom I phoned for advice, as they discovered they actually still had one in stock! Unfortunately at $670 (trade price) plus shipping, it couldn't be the first option either!

As you can see I considered various options and none were really that good. I was doing some more random, and rather aimless, searches, when I came across a forum post on Expandas Downunder where someone in Queensland had one for sale! The post was quite old so I followed it up. There were many potential issues here. Firstly the guy might visit the forum once a month, or once a year, so may not get my contact in time. If he did, it's highly likely it might not be available any more. and even if it that all worked out, Queensland is a massive place and it wouldn't be much use if it was in Cairns or Mt Isa - even Brisbane wouldn't be ideal! Well it turned out the guy DID still have it available, he wanted NOTHING for it, and when I checked his profile, he lived in ... Burrum Heads, which is about 30 minutes' drive away basically between here and Hervey Bay!

Installing the new power supply

So the arrangements were made and I collected it yesterday on our weekly shopping trip down to Hervey Bay! We did offer him some money for it as it was worth a lot more than $0 to us, but he wouldn't take anything. We were very grateful, and now we have lights and power again!

Jude had some fun with the old power supply. He pulled bits of it apart, extracted the cooling fan and wired it up to a 9V battery so he could have his own personal cooling fan!