Apparently there was heavy rain during the night but it was thunder around 6:20am that woke us. The thunder was in the distances and once we returned to bed, we stayed there until well after 8:30am.
After making a visit to the amenities block, “She” discovered that our van door would not lock. “He’ checked the door and confirmed that whilst the door would lock, it was starting to stick.
Later in the morning “He” applied some silicone spray to the lock and that seemed to do the trick, the part that had some movement in it was now permanently frozen in place. The lock was removed and further silicone applied to the frozen part which did eventually come free. Assistance was sought from some other members who had had “lock” problems in the past. The lock was reassembled quickly but when tested, presented the same problem that we were attempting to fix.
A call was made to an RV repairer in Nowra who confirmed that had replacement door locks. A very quick trip was made to Nowra and the replacement lock obtained. After returning, it took several of us a couple of hours to finally reinstall the replacement lock (that was after a change in the locks barrel). At one time we thought the lock was fixed an “He” went inside the caravan to test the lock. As one might guess, the lock was frozen and we were unable to unlock the door from either inside or outside. A screwdriver had to be passed through a window and the lock disassembled and removed to allow access to open the door. Shortly after 5:00pm, the lock was reinstalled and tested successfully.
We donated part of the mechanism to another member of our group who had also had a problem on the previous day with their lock handle cracking. Fortunately part of our lock was used as a replacement. It took less than 30 minutes to reinstall this lock compared to the hours spent on our caravan.
We cooked our evening meal close to 8:00pm and spent the remainder of the night watching television. We were also lucky that a large thunderstorm that had passed us and then stalled did not come back towards as had been the case when we were hit by hail in Alice Springs last year. We did learn that parts of NSW had experienced severe weather today with hail the size of golf balls reported.