Day 190

5 August 2013

Well while we were hoping to be off to Rainbow Beach yesterday, we still had a fair few things to sort out!

First the good news, we sold little shutz! Which was a welcome relief as it would have been awkward to try and sell it while not being at home. A nice middle aged couple bought it and they picked him up yesterday afternoon. Shutz is off for more adventures!

While we have just travelled around Australia I feel like we are starting all over again! We now need a tent as shutz is gone and the little dome tent we were camping in is falling apart (it was pretty good for $30), we just sold the only mattress we have with shutz (we used to just roll it up when we were using the tent), Joel informed me yesterday arvo that our Waeco fridge has finally taken its last breath, And even better the dual battery in the car is buggered so we will need to replace to run the new fridge! So while we have a lot of crap sitting in the shed none of it helps us with the bare essentials of shelter, bed, power and fridge! So here we are again shopping for the bare essentials and spending money that should be towards our travels.

Anyway we found a Black Wolf turbo tent on gumtree and while its not the 30 second oz tent (too big, would not fit on our roof racks or in the tray) we would have liked, it is a fairly quick tent to put up! Normally retailing for $600 we got it for $300 and was only used twice, which you wouldn't even know! Tent sorted.

Bed - well too many choices! We went from high density foam mattresses to swags to self inflating and eventually decided on the self inflating mattress as it was the smallest when rolled up. Bed sorted.

Now onto the fridge....now the first thing I will mention is I asked Joel many times whether he was sure the Waeco had no more life left in it and he assured me there was no hope. So after way too much procrastinating (we have never been procrastinators, honestly we were buy now, regret later sort of people, but since we have had limited funds and no regular incomes we have really thought things through before spending money. While this is a great lesson for us, after 30 mins of changing from one fridge to another in front of a poor salesman and eventually choosing our original choice we may have tipped our choice making too far in the other direction!) we decided the Engel Eclipse was the best choice for now because if we can get the Waeco fixed we will then have one fridge and one freezer (which is what you really need for long trips) and if we can't fix the Waeco we can buy another eclipse and it will still be cheaper than buying a dual zone fridge freezer option. Also by having two, if we are only gong on a small trip we can just take one fridge, and if going for longer can take both. See I told you we thought this through! Fridge done.

Realized just before purchasing a new battery that the battery we have was still under warranty so spent half the day stuffing around with the battery people until they agreed to replace the battery as long as we upgraded to a bigger one. Deal, and new battery done!

Arrive home with much lighter wallets but the essentials, pack up the car and organise the key to mums unit at Rainbow (we have had a hard day, deserve to skip the tent tonight!) Decided I might just check the Waeco and change over the led board in it (which we have had a problem with before) and what would you know?! It works fine! Argh!! Was considering killing Joel at this point! Good news is we now have two working fridges!

Tomorrow we are heading to Fraser for 3 nights with some good friends! What better way to start a trip of Queensland!

Carly & Joel

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