Well that’s it folks. We’re back home – pretty buggered but
safe n sound. It was a long haul getting back home with me dragging the boat
and Daz with the camper. The grey nomads helped keep us awake by breaking up
the boredom with bouts of frustration and terror as they trundled along at
85-90km/h in the middle of the road causing us to take some not-so-safe chances
getting around them (If I we’re PM I’d introduce GPS monitoring with compulsary euthanasia for anyone who limits the speed of their $250K land
cruiser and caravan to 90km/h to conserve fuel dollars - Just call me Adolph).
Our journey was marred by only one exiting incident. Coming
into Camooweal I lifted my foot off the accelerator to slow down for the 80km
p/h zone and something went a bit wiggy. The Dmax slowed down like someone had
thrown the anchors out, and the engine started roaring its guts out. In the
blink of an eye I was struggling to hit 40km p/h and stay under 3000rpm. What
the hell was going on? I said as much to Daz over the radio (who was right
behind me) and he promptly rolled the window down and said “yep I can smell
something”.
I wanted to pull over but there’s a series of causeways
coming into Camooweal with not space to pull over and I was on them. I was going
to have to limp into Camooweal for 1-2km with this problem. I switched into manual
and discovered that I could go down gears but not up beyond 3rd. So
sticking in 3rd I crawled across the causeway as a growing train of
traffic built up behind me.
Soon I could see a truck stop ahead and told Daz I was
pulling into it. Well you can imagine how much comfort I got from his response:
“Pull up as soon as you reach it and get the fire extinguisher
out QUICK – You’re on fire!”
Holy shit!
I said to Jess “As soon I pull up you get out and get away
from the car”. She whimpered Ok and was gone before the car came to a stop. It
took me a moment longer to get the extinguisher from the back seat and as I got
out, there was Daz grabbing the extinguisher and running back to the trailer
and spraying the white powder on the boat trailer brake pads which were indeed
on fire.
So it turns out that the anderson plug was a bit dodgy
(probably from 6 weeks of abuse) and the trailer breaks had lost power. They
have a feature that if that happens the breaks lock on (this is to stop a
trailer that may have fallen off a vehicle from rolling out of control). In
this case the Dmax was roaring and losing speed because it was trying to pull 4
trailer wheels with their disk brakes fully engaged. When the rubber brake pads
got super-hot they caught on fire. Moral to the story? Maintain your anderson
plugs, and ALWAYS install a fire extinguisher in your car.
Once we gave the trailer half an hour to cool down (while we
had lunch and in my case a valium) Daz taped up that anderson plug the stop the
connection from, er, disconnecting, the Dmax and the trailer were back to their
happy selves and behaved for the rest of the way home.
We stopped at about 3:30 each arvo with the first night at
41 Mile Bore on the Barkley Tablelands (Just after passing the All4Adventure
fancy new boat on a truck – it looked a bit wimpy next to Skull Drag’n) then
onto Clem Walton Park near Cloncurry (where a well-dressed old english gentlemen
with two dogs and a cat and big caravan described himself as a “seasoned traveler” and recommended where we should camp – which we politely ignored cos
he was clueless), then onto Longreach where we farewelled the oldies, and on to
good Ol’ freezing Muckadilla for our final night.
We got home yesterday without further incident and have now
started the cleanup job that looks like it’s going to continue for, oh about 12
months or so. But that’s ok – it was worth every spot and blemish.
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| Our last day. Muckadilla. |
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| 41 Mile Bore campsite |
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| Sun set over the Barkley Tableands |
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| That's a wrap! |
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| The Big Clean Up |
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