Finally we set off  – first stop Girraween National Park. Great campsite all newly planted with natives and the sites are large. I had my first attempt at reversing the caravan into our bay. Only had two people and a few kangaroos watching so not too bad, happy with my efforts.

Simon is going to be working three days a week from the caravan so we have Starlink. It’s normal set up is a four pronged stand you place on the ground but we have adapted this to be mounted on the caravan.  So far so good excellent reception and we can run a tv, computers and phones using Starlink.

We are trying to get into a routine that works for us both. I need to be up and out of the caravan so that Simon has time to set up his workstation for the day. It will be easier when it gets warmer but here its very cold in the morning so I am not keen to get out before 9.30am. I then set off on my trails for the day. It is very quiet here not many people at all. One day didn’t see anyone for 4 hours! I then try and get back to camp for mid afternoon. My legs don’t quite know what’s going on with all this sudden activity. I should get fit if I am out walking three days a week. Simon not getting to see much on the days he’s working but will catch up on the days he has off. Loads of kangaroos and wallabies here and they don’t seem to bothered by us, they come very close to the caravan.

Disaster 1 – I am sure there will be many but this is our first. Just getting ready to have a beer and cook dinner and the caravan lights all go off. They flash a few times and then nothing. Everything has gone off except for Starlink. These modern caravans have a very complicated wiring system. We have 3 solar panels and two lithium batteries and the whole monitoring system is BMPRO. Before leaving we had been advised that if we were running an inverter for Starlink we would need a shunt and a comms link so that the BMPRO system would be able to track the power we were pulling. So we followed the advice got a professional auto electrician to fit it to the lithium batteries. All good or so we thought. We wrongly assumed that what power we were seeing on screen was what we had left, 5 mins before losing all power it was telling us we had 18 hours left. Obviously there was something wrong somewhere.

Luckily for us there was a mains power socket at the toilet block. So we moved the caravan to the bay right next to it. We then ran our extension leads and connected up the caravan hey presto we had lights and we were charging again. A fellow caravanner came to help us, the kangaroos must have thought that there were strange goings on with us all with our headlights shuffling tables, chairs, pots and pans across the camping area.

Ranger came in the morning and couldn’t have been nicer about us using their electricity. New part ordered should be in Stanthorpe tomorrow so that we can get everything back working properly.