Road test

Last Thursday/Friday was to be our big test prior to shipping.  We picked up the car from the workshop and went for a drive with the aim of testing that everything worked as expected and to try camping.  There will be eight days of camping in Mongolia where there just aren't any hotels.

The weather was pretty hot.  We went west from Sydney and after a bit of gravel around Lithgow we found ourselves very dusty, and the engine running hot and having vaporisation problems.

We then headed for Parkes where we found a caravan park!  

Mark (ever cautious) took a cabin as well as a camp site.  He hasn’t camped since he was a boy scout and that’s a long while ago. I suspect our patch of green grass in Parkes is a bit more  friendly than the Gobi desert but the organisers tell us that camp spots there will have showers and food.

We ate at the local Services club and as we walked home it started to rain!!  We did stay in the tent all night and the only thing we used from the cabin was the pillows.  We will need to make some provision for that.  We managed to get the tent back in its bag and it wasn’t that much bigger than when we got it out.
We had been here before in Classic Outback trial and in Sydney to London but this time we had time to look at the wild life.

Highlight of the trip back to Stewie’s workshop was the size of the kangaroos in the forest south of Parkes.  

The pictures are of one who hopped along a fence line beside the car and it wasn’t the biggest we saw.  It could have headed off into open spaces but didn’t bother.  It was doing about 40 KPH and easily cleared 3 fences that were in its path while we were watching.

And there were dozens if not hundreds of these very large 'roos.

So...

Car back to Stewart for:
  1. Dust sealing,
  2. Check why its running hot.
  3. Work on a list of trivia mainly about packing and securing stuff.

I reckon we are ready but we still haven’t been given a shipping date.