Motorhome Travels - September 2012

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29/09/2012

It's said that no news is good news. Well in our case no news means slow progress. It was the 10th of August that the back of the bus was rearranged by a tree after a terrifying backwards down hill adventure. It is now 7 weeks later and we still don't have Hobohome back. What we do have is a fairly long list of well constructed (and I suspect well used) excuses and a number of dates (now in the past) that we were to have the work completed by.

While it has been a good opportunity to actually live in the shouse and test it all out, we are both now totally sick of waiting. I have recently adopted a more nagging approach - I phone the panel beater each day and ask for a progress report. Unfortunately we are more than 100km from the workshop where the work is being done, so in person visits are not very practical. The one time that we did visit, we were shocked to see how little work had been done. After nearly 10 years living in the bus, it is very disturbing to be without it.

We have been told that it should be ready for us to pick up next Wednesday (the 5th of October) - but we are resisting the urge to get excited. I just hope that when we do get it back, that the workmanship is up to standard. While Hobohome is of course an old vehicle, we have gone to great lengths to make it robust and reliable. It would not be good if the replacement parts and work were not up to that standard.

Tracey has been working at the local hospital and I have been kept quite busy with our Imageworkx business. We have added a number of new customers to our portfolio and I have just finished a large project that should provide ongoing work for some time.

I have also finished the security and surveillance system for the shouse. I spent a few years working in the security industry and have always enjoyed tinkering in this area. The entire system is now controllable from my phone.

While the shouse was never really intended to house us while the bus is not here, it has not really been too bad. The biggest issue is the lack of power and this has forced us to run a generator for a few hours each day - something that I find very annoying. We erected our wind turbine when we first arrived back here and this has made a very useful contribution. I always thought it was very quiet - it turns out that this is because we had only used it while parked next to the sea. It is actually quite noisy, but the sound is almost exactly like the sound of the sea and for that reason we never really noticed it. I will be very happy to go back to the sound of solar panels producing electricity when we move back into the bus.

We have come up with a plan for what we will now do when we leave here. In a bit of a turn around (well, complete turn around) we will be taking the Vitara and boat with us and heading north in search of some good fishing. To that end we have spent quite a bit of time and money on the Vitara, getting it back into shape to be once again dragged behind Hobohome. More on the destination in the next update.

 

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