Kent Mountain Rains and Onward to Stanthorpe
Rinse and repeat as they say, whoever they are. Friday found us back at Kent Mountain again but this time for real… real you say.
So the summary is this if you’re preparing to travel for six months, organising everything on the home front in one and a bit days is a little tight. Sure, we’d covered all of the major stuff but it was the tidy up and finalisation of items like tax and power/water/house that actually needed more time. Also try to avoid adding shipping a car also on the same day as you’re departing…
The upside of this was that when we finally got away the road was kind, the car was shipped and the family all turned up at the mountain. Only mistakes were checking the foundation strength of a support pillar of a house with the side of the Ultimate. Don’t take tight turns immediately after installing extension mirrors. The Ultimate is strong… but the external power adapter and the awning beam stay holder are not as strong as house supports. A few rivets later, and it was history with some egos bruised.
For several years the Darling Downs have been dry, this meant that Kent mountain was pretty brown and hard to enjoy. Now, however, the rains have come and the mountain is lush and green.
The mountain was good fun as usual, shashlyk was had and the main thing!
There was some drizzle which made any bare soil extremely sticky. They say that if you stick to the downs in the dry, it’ll stick to you in the wet!
The Ultimate seemed to redeem its itself with respect to the hot water system and we let it run for roughly a day to ‘burn-in’ you may say. This seemed to improve things but it still seemed a little finickity.
Collecting a few more parts from the spare LandCruiser (which was at the mountain) left us mostly ready to move on.
The drive from Nobby through to Stanthorpe was pretty easy, although for the LandCruiser this meant another slog of uphill climbing, which it coped with well.
Driving through Warwick was quite convenient as we stopped at Bunnings for some extra tools and supplies.
After we left for Stanthorpe we realised that all spares bought we’d doubled up on as were some additional fan belts and spares left at the mountain from the previous trip to Cape York (for a 40 series LandCruiser a complete list of spares and bits we took is here). This meant a quick return trip in the evening (less van) and a dinner at Soban House in Warwick which was very tasty.