As previously mentioned, our air conditioning in the caravan provides us with adequate warmth irrespective of the outside temperature. Last night it worked a dream and we had a restful night.
It was cold when we woke but the temperature was a positive number and our fresh water hose and grey water waste hose had not frozen as “He” had expected.
Whilst we did not have a great distance to travel, we were ready to depart just after 8:30am.
With little traffic to contend with, we had a quick trip to Blayney where we stopped for fuel. It took a little while to leave the garage as another motorist put $5.00 worth of fuel in her car and then struggled to find a credit card with sufficient funds to pay for the fuel. The driver actually passed us on the way into Blayney and obviously had no idea that speed increases fuel consumption.
Just before arriving in Bathurst we suggested to our friends who were following us that it might be a good time to do a lap around Mount Panorama. We have been around there in a motorhome, in the ute but never with the caravan in tow. Our friends had never been there. So we did a lap. “He” was very careful taking the caravan across the mountain and then down the steep descent known as “The Dipper”.
We were going to stop at Bathurst for coffee but decided to continue to Lithgow and have an early lunch at McDonalds.
After finishing our lunch, we climbed out of Lithgow on the Bells Line of Road which was the most direct route to Richmond. We had never taken the caravan over that road and probably never will again. The road was disgusting and needs major work to upgrade the surface. The steep descents at the end of the road put a lot of pressure on our braking system and our friends later informed us they could smell our brakes.
We checked into “Wanderest” (an initiative by the Richmond Club to provide a cheap spot to park) having booked powered sites several weeks ago. Unfortunately we were not given flat sites and in fact, we had no chance at all to get the caravan anywhere near level on the site allocated to us. We were tempted to continue on home but decided to move to a flatter unpowered site to spend our final night.
We had happy hour near our caravan before enjoying the buffet in the Richmond Club. We had to deal with a drama at home during the evening (our hot water service decided to have a major failure which resulted in water being dropped onto our carpet and a potential electrical fire) but our family were super in resolving and rectifying the problem.
Fortunately the temperature was around 9 degrees when we returned to the caravan and we spent the remainder of the evening and our final night in the caravan on this trip watching television until late. We had a comfortable nights sleep.