Down the Coast – 01/24/2013
Jan 25th, 2013 by admin
It pours all night and occasionally a squawl comes through with some healthy wind gusts. It’s the metal roofing of the walkways that really wakes us when he rain comes down in sheets. At dawn, look out the window and the sea is reasonably calm and the rain has slowed temporarily.
The plan is to just work our way down the coast on the Bruce Highway toward Brisbane. Hopefully the weather just off the coast will be a little better than the actual coast itself.
But as soon as we leave the town and head for the Bruce Highway, the rain picks up again. And the traffic picks up, too. This weekend is Australia Day weekend, a national holiday, and there are campers headed everywhere. Not that the cyclone cares. For large parts of the eastern coast the weekend is supposed to be a washout.
And there’s a lot of road construction that tends to bunch up the traffic. We’d expected the construction work to be completely halted because of the rain but some continues in spite of it. Traffic, rain, a bummer.
There’s no sightseeing though there are some towns we wanted to stop in along the way. There’s not point in doing so in the driving rain. We just grind it out and drive.
We waned to get close to Brisbane so that tomorrow we could see the big city. But we decide to stop short of Brisbane on Deception Bay in a seaside town called Redcliffe. We find a small hotel right on the water that has an attached restaurant.
We check in and catch up on the news. Everywhere that we’ve been farther north on the coast has flooded. We had wanted to go to Townsville but decided not to because of the cyclone and the potential for flooding. Since the cyclone hit Townsville, they’ve gotten 500 mm (about 20 inches) of rain and the town is flooded.
Even worse had we gone there, the Bruce Highway is cut between Townsville and Rockhampton with no traffic getting through. The flooding isn’t really that bad but we’d have been stranded there if we had gone.
The same is true for Rockhampton and Gladstone both of which we had just been through. It looks like we’re moving south ahead of the flooding by about 12 – 24 hours. It’s certainly ruined our sightseeing.
We call Ivan to get news of our plan to ship the Cherokee to either Buenas Aires or Chile. He’s been getting quotes for shipping the car RoRo or by container. RoRo stands for Roll On/ Roll off which is much cheaper that shipping by container. There are some issues with RoRo but RoRo’s pricing make the problems acceptable. We shipped from Vladivostok to Brisbane by container because RoRo wasn’t available out of Vladivostok.
Ivan is trying to get us prices for both RoRo and FCL (container) shipping, the port charges for each port and the available shipping dates. He has some info in it shows a big difference in price as we expected. We confirm our departure dates (after February 1st) and our arrival dates in South America (After April 1st). He expects to have the rest of the information by tomorrow.
We have dinner. The rain picks up. Back to the room for a bit of TV time and then to sleep
Obi-wan
7 Responses to “Down the Coast – 01/24/2013”
How’s the brakes & shocks holding out? Any major fixes planned before shipping to South America? Enjoy reading your adventure, pictures and following the spot track. Two older than dirt guys can fix anything… Take care. Joe
The brakes have been fine since we pulled the ABS fuse. The shocks have been fine, too, now that we are on pavement.
The only thing we are planning to do before we ship to SA is change the oil and filters.
We are debating whether to bring a replacement ABS control unit down to SA when we pick up the car. Probably not. It looks like John has driven the car w/o ABS all these years and replacing the control unit may not do anything for us. The car drives fine as it is.
It’s just two ole guys with an old, reliable car. Wouldn’t want to insult her after all these miles.
P
Ya, the car is probable thinking if those two old guys can do it so can I.
My 2003 sequoia has ABS + “traction control”. One inhibits the brakes, the other inhibits power. Haven’t worked since the $1000 computer went out a 2nd time years ago. Would I fix it if the youngsters were going to drive in rain, ice, or snow? Yes. Will I fix it for my driving? No! i’m pretty sure you and John know when the wheels are about to start sliding befor the computer does. Experience beats technology any day.
The fact that you can defeat it at all is one of the great attractions for me of the older cars. A lot of more recent models of cars will not allow you to defeat ABD or traction control.
When you try, the ar fires the MIL light and then either goes into “Limp” mode or refuses to go at all. The manual usually (and casually, I might add), suggests that you seek professional help, ie, have it towed to the nearest dealer. Not very helpful when you’re trying to teach someone to rally.
Obi-wan
Spot has gone silent in Sydney. Must be having a few Foster’s.
That, too. We dropped the car at the export’s shipper and the Spot is taking a well deserved rest in my duffle.
I’ll download all the Spot data today and the icon will link to a Google Earth view of all data points from France to Sydney.
P