Trouble Comes in Threes

With only a fairly short trip from Kalbarri to Geraldton, we had booked the van in for a service at Geraldton for the day we arrived. We figured if we got going early we could be there around 10:00, which would give them plenty of time to do a service and still have us on our site around mid-afternoon. The service timing was also convenient given the tear to the awning experienced at Kalbarri, we figured they could also try and repair that at the same time.

We were up and away bright and early and well on track for a 10am arrival when BANG all of a sudden the car started wobbling over the road. We pulled over and checked out the situation - one of the rear tyres on the car had blown out. We still don't know why, we hadn't seen anything on the road so maybe it had been weakened previously or we ran over a nail or something. It was only a narrow road verge and not very level, but we were fearful of damaging the wheel rim if we tried to go on to somewhere more suitable. It took us a while of crawling around in the dirt trying to get the jack underneath the car before we twigged that step 1 should have been to unhitch the van, things became slightly easier after that (but only slightly). Heaven knows how long it would have taken us to get the wheel changed but a knight in shining armour (or at least an ex-tyrefitter on his way to a day at the beach) stopped and helped out. Even with his strength and knowhow it still delayed us about an hour - and ruined John's shorts - but the caravan service people weren't worried and promised to be done by 4:00.

The first thing we did after dropping off the van was go to the local tyre dealership, where we were solemnly informed that the tyre was stuffed and we would have to buy a new one, they didn't have one the same as the other tyres so we will have to leave the old spare on the car and the new tyre has become the spare. At least they put the new spare back onto the frame on the car for us.

When we returned to pick up the van sure enough it was ready - but still with the tear in the awning. They said that it couldn't be repaired but had to be replaced, in fact they pointed out that it wasn't just the canvas but the frame itself had been damaged. However they were very helpful and assisted us to put in a claim to our insurance company. Today we had to hitch up and take the van over there and they spent the morning installing an entire new awning, frame, canvas - the lot. We had to pay the standard $200 excess, which was less than 10% what it would have cost without the insurance, and we now have a nice new bright awning. We hadn't realised how faded the old one had got!

While we were waiting for the insurance claim to be approved during the week, we started to have trouble with our PC. It has actually been playing up for some months, every now and then it will suddenly shut down for no apparent reason. We had taken it to a PC shop when we were in Yamba but they couldn't find anything wrong with it, and bizarrely it had seemed to be alright since then so we figured they had managed to fix it without even realising it. However, this week it started to happen again, and again and again. The last couple of times we noticed that just before it shut down the battery warning message came up, even though it was plugged into power at the time. We found the local PC shop and they confirmed that indeed our battery is stuffed. They didn't have a replacement of the same type, so now we have the battery removed from the laptop and we are running on mains power only. We'll hopefully be able to get a new battery when we get to Perth next week

So it's been an eventful, and fairly expensive, couple of weeks. Hopefully now that we've had 3 failures so quickly we'll be right again for a while!