Day 97 - 106 (May 7-16) - Woodgate, Wamuran

Sorry it's been a while since our last update! We left Woodgate on May 7 to drive back down towards Brisbane and stay with Luke and Tammy whom we'd visited on the way up a few weeks ago. There were lots of reasons why, but here's some of them!

First and foremost, obviously it was a lovely invitation! We knew them from years ago and hadn't caught up for a long time, and they have kids around the same age as ours. On the flipside it was a long drive back down to where we'd just come from. But a couple of other factors conspired that it really ended up being simpler to drive back.


The other factors were a bit techhie so I might touch on those a bit later on and first cover the broadly more interesting content of where we are and what we're doing! :)

We arrived late on Thursday night. Luke and Tammy have a lovely property with probably several acres I'd guess of land. They have a dam, a creek running nearby, plenty of space, some motorbikes, and as I said kids around the same age as ours. So we've had our van parked in their shade shed since we arrived, which gives us protection and power. There's not heaps of phone signal but the Cel-Fi Go signal booster has been a great help as we've had the car parked nearby and the internal antenna pointed towards the front of the van.

While all kids have had school work to do, there's been enough time for them to play all sorts of games - Sardines (like gang-up hide and seek I think!?), cricket, motorbike riding (to Matt's delight!), canoeing and swimming in the dam and so on.

The first couple of nights we had pizza for tea outside by the fire from a guy next door who has just started his own wood-oven pizza business. We were more than happy to be the guinea pigs on this and they were certainly delicious pizzas!






OK to roughly keep this in chronological order I'll have to get a bit technical here. Just skip over the next two sections if you're not interested.

1. Solar Blanket Replacement

We've never had a van with batteries before, so when we got this van we had to consider how to charge the batteries, as the van has no solar panels installed. They'll charge from the car when it's running but this wouldn't do if we were in one place for a while. So before we left we considered various options and decided on an Adventure Kings 120W solar blanket, which is basically a series of thin solar panels with flexible material in between which allows it to fold up fairly thin and flat when not in use.

We felt 120W (i.e. 10A @ 12V) would be the current we'd need to recharge the batteries in a reasonable time, however when we were at Buxton and had it out in the full sun it was only generating just under 3A in the full sun and into fairly flat batteries!

As a slightly mathematical aside, it turned out the maximum power you'd actually get going into the batteries would only be about 85W, as the 120W rating was out of the panel at 20V, not out of the regulator which has to pull that down to about 13.5V. Nonetheless, 40W was still a long way south of its rated capacity in such ideal conditions. So over the past few weeks I had arranged for a return and replacement.

By this stage we were at Woodgate, but fixing the problem was complicated because the nearest 4WD Supacentre (where we'd bought it from) was down in Brendale, which is about 15 minutes on the OTHER side of Dan and Bec's, where we'd been staying while in Brisbane. To cut a long story short, having provided them full and detailed measurements, photos and a video of the faulty blanket at work, they eventually agreed to a return and that they would give us a store credit us once we'd posted it back to them. However it wasn't clear how long that would take, nor how long Australia Post would take to send us a replacement. And we didn't want to stay at Woodgate for TOO long. However if we were physically close to the Brendale store we could just drive down, pick them up, and get on our way when we were ready.

2. Pajero Auxiliary Lights

I've already described in an earlier post the various options we've tried on the Pajero to get decent night lighting and that we had settled on just the two spotlights. These really worked very well; however while there was reasonable illumination to the edges, the centre beam was so much brighter that the extreme contrast when your eyes were used to the brightness of the main beam made it hard to pick things up towards the edges.

So we decided to buy a pair of these small auxiliary side lights as I eluded to. Given the postage delays and potential delay getting a store credit from the blanket to use in this order, we would likely be stuck at Woodgate for another few weeks if we pre-ordered these and waited for them to arrive. However if we were down near Brisbane we could at least drop down there, pick them up with the new solar blanket, and then get on our way with all the loot in the car and no shipping delays.

So back to the main story!

So with those technicalities out the way, Friday we decided to get down to Brendale and pick up the replacement solar blanket and get the auxiliary lights. The lights had come back into stock, but unfortunately I was just about to leave, checked the website and found the lights were out of stock again! :( More stock was not expected until mid-May. We decided to take the 45 minute drive anyway to at least get the solar blanket replacement finalised. The lights could wait if they had to. We ended up getting the 200W version which is supposed to be able to pump out over 10A, which is what we thought the last one was supposed to do anyway! Measurements showed it produced over 9A in full sun so it's looking much better than the other one.

While we were out we got a wheel alignment done on the Pajero while Mim and Matt were doing some shopping. It also gave Bek, Jude and I the chance to sneakily buy a Mother's Day present for Mim! We bought some Mother's brand car cleaner (just what every mother wants!) as a bit of a joke, and a massage voucher as the 'real' present.

Just what every Mother wants!

The kids cooked pancakes for breakfast and tried to give Mim a nice morning treat.

Sunday we had the meeting together which was lovely. On a couple of occasions we played family games inside - one night it was one of their kids' birthdays which was a good excuse to get together!

Cam, Dan, Bek, Luke, Tam, Mim, Jude, Matt

The kids have made great use of the dam and creek nearby!

Bek and Millie with Caramel, one of the guinea pigs

Millie and Laila have some guinea pigs which Bek really took a liking to! As you would know by now, Bek is rather horse-mad and has a penchant for adding a bridle to anything with legs. This time it wasn't quite a bridle as such, but she made a girth to put around the middle of this guinea pig so she could attach a long lead to it! The sight of Bek walking across the field taking a guinea pig for a walk is something to behold!

On Tuesday we dropped up to see Tammy's parents, Rod and Karen. I met them both at a Youth Conference in 1997 and have crossed paths many times since so it was lovely to see them again! They've just moved into a house they built on a property they bought about 15 minutes from Luke and Tammy's. We had a lovely meal they'd cooked in the oven which is part of their wood-fired stove! We enjoyed reading the account of Paul's shipwreck in Acts 27 together.

I had a call from one of my old Adelaide Uni safety team members while I was there, it was nice to hear how things were going back there. There were a couple of work-related matters I'd been involved for which they'd not been able to track down the specific details - I was surprised what little details I could still remember about a gas regulator audit we ran in 2017/18! Higher education has had some challenges for sure so hopefully things will get back to normal before too long.


On Monday I had checked the 4WD Supacentre website and found, lo and behold, the lights which were out of stock on Friday were now IN STOCK! We could have saved ourselves a trip! Not to worry... so we moved Bek's orthodontist appointment from Thursday locally, to Wednesday down near Brisbane, and decided to do this as part of the trip down to pick up the new lights. We'd also had an invitation from Dan and Bec to visit them for tea that night, so made a day trip out of our journey back down towards Brisbane.

Matt helping to install the new auxiliary lights

After the orthodontist, getting the lights and doing some shopping, we had a couple of hours to kill so we stopped at Wyllie Park in Petrie. Matt and I installed the little auxiliary lights on the Pajero and we all got some business / school work done before we headed down to visit. It was lovely to see them all again and the kids had a ball, as usual!

Back at Dan and Bec's! The girls having a good game together

They'd just bought a small second-hand motorbike
which Matt loved rolling around (too noisy to ride at night!)

The last couple of days the motorbikes have come out. They weren't working before but their boys got them fixed and were thrilled to have them up and running again! Luke and Tam were, understandably, reluctant to take on the responsibility of other peoples' kids on motorbikes but were happy for me to teach them how to ride. So Friday afternoon, May 15, when we had the place to ourselves (and there was no-one for the kids to show off to!) I took all the kids through the basics of how to ride. They all picked it up fairly quickly and they had great fun! I think it's a good skill for them to have just in case it's needed sometime.

We all had a go on the small quad bike, while Mim, Bek and I also rode the two-wheelers.

Matt

Judah

'Motocross Mimi'! :)

Bek

Bek

Where to from here?

Well that is the question! We had only thought to stay to possibly Monday or Tuesday, but once we got here we realised we needed to get Bek booked into an orthodontist for her braces (we'd tried to organise that when we were in Brisbane but as the Covid lockdowns were at their peak then the orthodontists were only dealing with top priority patients). It worked out that a Thursday appointment was going to work the best, which pushed our stay on a few days (although in the end we did it Wednesday as mentioned), but by the time Friday came and we were getting ready to leave, our kids and their kids were all enjoying themselves so much, and appealed so plaintively, that we arranged to stay until around the 21st-22nd. There is no particular urgency to leave, but we do want to get on our way and see some more things. So next week we are hoping to take some day trips out to places we might have liked to have seen on our trip anyway but come back here in the evenings. This will hopefully keep everyone happy. Tonight Bek went out to a youth group activity quiz night - it was nice for her to get some contact with some other kids her age.

Hope you're all doing well, it's close to midnight now on Saturday night! Take care and God bless!

-- Greg