June 13-14 (Day 134-135) - Proserpine

June 13

Early next morning the kids cooked pancakes while I got ready to announce the winners of the Instagram competition. Phone signal wasn't great but we figured we didn't have time to drive back into Proserpine itself as well as all the work needed to do the live draw.

So, I wasn't going to go into the details here, as up to now I've kept the business side of things out of this blog. But the drawing of this competition pretty well dominated the morning, so I'll lift the lid a little on what happened. I'm not "wanting" you to watch this, let me be clear, because this isn't really my 'thing', but if this blog to be a fairly thorough account of what we've done then I guess I need to include it.


Basically the process here was that I posted three photos on Instagram, and people had to follow us, comment on one of the photos and tag someone else who would then see it themselves. The more people they tagged in separate comments, the more entries they would get. At the moment we're sponsoring a virtual BBQ competition in USA, so we already had a number of people watching what we were doing, so it was a good chance to try to piggy-back on that and grow our own audience.

The competition had been running for several days. I closed it at 9am local time with the draw at 10am, and that was a very busy hour! Firstly I had to go through all the people who had commented on the photos; then confirm if they'd also liked the post and followed us. So there were three columns containing about 400 data points, and to get into the draw someone had to have a match on both the Like and Follow columns, and if they did then any matches to their name in the Comment column would count as one entry. Unfortunately there was no particularly easy way to do this so most of it was manual data processing, then copying the names into a spreadsheet which we printed and then had to cut up. At 10am, Mim and I (with a bit of help from Bek) were still madly cutting up these little strips of names!

So I was a bit late getting started. Mim then had to hold the antenna for the mobile phone signal booster up so I had enough signal strength to run the live, and there were a couple of hiccups, but it went ahead fairly OK and we got a winner. If you want to see what happened (sigh), here's the video; If not, thank you and please just keep reading! :)

Jude and his coconut tree

Last night Jude had found some coconut palms, and this morning while I was busy he picked up some more coconuts which had fallen on the ground, cut them open and we all enjoyed some fresh coconut for morning tea!

With that all out the way we packed up and headed into Proserpine. Our goal for the day was to head to a free camp somewhere up the coast. Mim did some shopping in Proserpine, and we then went around the corner to a park to have lunch.

The kids love parks and playgrounds, and this one had a couple of hamster wheels which they loved. After a while we had a good game of playground chasey, which has always been a favourite family activity. I had to be careful as my toe was still healing, but bit by bit I felt I was able to do a bit more without stressing the healing cut too much.

Anyway we'd finished lunch, been to the toilet and I was just wandering a bit aimlessly around the park when I noticed a sign on the other side of the road saying 'RV Park'. I was puzzled, because there'd certainly been no sign of a RV park in the middle of Proserpine. It just looked like a concrete driveway next to a church leading to a large grassed patch out the back. I showed Mim and after a bit of discussion we decided to give it a try. By this time it was after 3pm, and we do like to stop travelling around 3-4pm, especially if staying in a free camp so you get a reasonable choice of location.

On closer inspection of the site in Wikicamps (the phone app we use to find campsites), it turned out whoever had added this one in hadn't listed it as a 'Free' camp. So when we had the app filtered to just show 'Free' campsites, this one got excluded. I updated it.

The location was quite good and not too busy.We pulled in and set up, and found ourselves next to an older couple who had been near us when we'd gone to the first campground two nights ago by Lake Proserpine. They'd seen us arrive and then leave and had wondered why, and now they were camped next to us!

Caravan Brakes

While I was here I wanted to have a look at the brakes on the caravan. We'd had them looked at by Jayco in Bairnsdale in Victoria around mid March, and they'd done some adjustments, but we'd found they really weren't working particularly well. Jayco had said there were various things needing replacing, so we'd booked it in in Townsville to get done. However I wanted to see if there was something that could be easily fixed. I'd phone Uncle Royce about it and he'd given me some tips. So while we were here on a flat surface, and not too late in the day, I pulled the back left wheel off and had a look.

There didn't seem to be too much wrong with them visually. I tried a small amount of grease on some of the metal-on-metal surfaces in case that was causing a problem, but it didn't seem to make much of a difference when I put the wheel back on. It seemed that the most likely culprit was the brake magnets (the oval thing hanging down by wires in the photo above). Apparently over time these can lose their magnetism (somehow), and thus not grip as well. Not having a spare, I put everything back together, but I now had a much better idea of how the system worked and also had something to test if I could buy one replacement magnet to swap in. I'd also eliminated a sticky mechanism as a potential culprit.

 June 14

The campsite had been nice and quiet overnight. The caravan and car were both booked in at Townsville to be looked at on Friday June 19 and Monday June 22 respectively, so given this was still several days away and we were only about 250km away, we decided to stay put for another day and night. The campground had a 48 hour limit so we could do that without any difficulties.

We had Sunday School first. I took Bek and Mim took the boys. The lesson with Bek was the return of the exiles from Babylon under Ezra, so I first asked her to explain her own understanding of what happened. She had most of the facts there, but unsurprisingly a few were missing and some of the others were in the wrong order. So we had a productive morning straightening out the 70 year desolation vs the 70 year captivity of Jeremiah 25 and 29 respectively, the temple foundation rebuilding under Zerubbabel and Ezra vs the city wall rebuilding under Nehemiah, and the different opposition each group faced. It was great seeing the attitude of the rebuilders who were willing to leave all the comforts of Babylon to return and rebuild, but who like us still struggled to keep their priorities right and for a while lost focus and turned their attention to their own houses instead of God's. We then had our meeting and got on with some work in the afternoon.

Failed inverter!

Eek! Don't like that red Fault light! :(

The weather was not oppressively hot, but it was very still in Proserpine, so we had both 240V fans running from the inverter. Unfortunately during the afternoon the inverter suddenly decided to die! It had been working fine, then I plugged in the laptop and it suddenly stopped, sounded an alarm and brought on the Fault light. The van batteries still had plenty of charge, but even with nothing plugged into it it still wouldn't restart properly.

If you're not familiar with an 'inverter', here's a two minute simple explanation.

All devices which you plug into a normal wall power point run on what's called "240 volts 'AC' (alternating current)". But in the caravan, we only have "12 volts 'DC' (direct current)". This means you can't charge anything from a car or caravan battery which normally plugs into a 240V wall socket, at least not directly. If you have power points in your caravan, they normally only work if you're at a caravan park or home and have the van plugged into a power point via its power cord.

An 'inverter' takes the 12 volts DC power from the caravan batteries, and via some clever electronic circuitry turns it into 240V AC, which means you can then run most normal mains-powered devices.

I installed our inverter before we left because we have intended to be doing as much free camping or bush camping as possible and didn't want to be relying on caravan parks very often.

So the failed inverter was very frustrating, as we now had no way of running any 240V devices, in particular running the fans to keep some air movement during the night, or charging two of the three laptops which can't be charged from USB (we have a laptop and a Microsoft Surface Pro 5 which both have to charge from 240V, as well as a smaller Microsoft Surface 3 which can charge from USB). Without a laptop I couldn't get any work done.

So I contacted the eBay seller I'd bought it from, as well as the manufacturer, and explained our situation and that we needed a replacement pretty soon. Thankfully they agreed to ship us a replacement to Townsville as soon as we'd posted the faulty unit off, so we scheduled that in to be done the next day on our way out of town.

-- Greg