A week or so ago we decided that we needed to get away for a few days. After looking for places that we haven’t seen we lit upon the Kiata Campground in the Little Desert National Park in Victoria.
The drive was a bit over 500 km’s and was pretty boring. It was made a bit more interesting by the GPS deciding that it wasn’t going to play nicely but eventually we got there and got set up.
For the first day it was hot – around 36degC so we lounged around in the shade or inside the camper. We went for a short explore around the campground but that was about it.
The next couple of days it was windy and I mean WINDY. We spent the day listening to the canvas flap and putting the awning poles back up. In the end we got sick of the awning poles coming down so we packed it up and lived without it. We did have a mob of emu’s stroll through the campground though.
The next day we had howling wind and showers so we just spent the time indoors. We couldn’t even do any idle web surfing as we only had, at best, one bar of 3G mobile coverage. Afternoon naps followed by dinner and a couple of glasses of plonk with some musings on the state of play.
On Saturday night went into Nhill for dinner at the one of the pubs. It was crap. Jenny’s meal, Veal Cordon Bleu, was overcooked to buggery verging on burnt and my spinach and ricotta ravioli was frozen and reheated to the point of disintegration. The sauce was watery and flavourless. We won’t be going back there.
One good thing did come out of it though. We found we had a relative living in Nhill. We didn’t get to see them but we will next time.
After we got back to our camp a young bloke came over and asked if we had jumper leads as his battery was dead flat. They were a pair of nice young guys who were European tourists doing a lap in a Ford station wagon and had had a bit of bad luck with their previous car (broken head gasket) and had just got this one a couple of days previously. They’d been sitting in the car all day out of the wind, and I can’t blame them for that at all, listening to the radio and flattened the battery. Using the Anderson plug on the Land Rover we managed to get their battery charged enough for them to get their car started. They went off on a drive for about an hour to properly charge it. I hope they were OK after we left.
Sunday, it dawned overcast and still but we had to pack up and leave. Got all packed up and ready to go by around 10.30am and off we went. The drive home, as expected, was a boring affair with the only interest being a bit of heavy traffic over the West gate Bridge.
I had no idea this place existed. Looking at the map it looks like a foreign country to us Queenslanders. I might put it on the list, but not the pub grub.
I got here from the solar panel debate on the Grey Nomads forum. I note how you have your solar blanket set up. I was almost going to buy one until I read on the Kings web page that you need to put them on your windscreen to absorb the heat they generate. I decided against them because that means setting up my car to face the sun etc. I actually bought the “Maxray” ones from Outbax and find that they seem to deliver. I use them to charge my Bluetti bank and it can’t tolerate over voltage or over wattage, so if they are conservative then that’s better for me. We had the flexible ones on our old boat and they worked great, but I put expansion joint foam strips under them to allow air flow. With a good mppt controller they were great, with a cheap pwm controller they were useless.