What is it with us and batteries?!

Today we woke up and boy was it cold. We experienced our first frosty window screen and it's never a good sign when you can see your breath inside the van. After a very long time of building up the courage to get out of our sleeping bags we managed to get ourselves ready to explore Whakatane. The reason we came here is to take a guided tour of White Island, New Zealand's only active volcano. After discovering the trip hadn't run for the past few days because of bad weather we decided to book on to a tour on Thursday when it wws meant to be brighter. We planned to use today to explore the area and potentially visit a better Maori culture show than our last one. It was all going well and we sat ready to go and then the engine wouldn't start. It wasn't even really trying to. We figured it probably was just cold and this has happened a few times before. Thinking we'd give it a while to warm up we went for a walk down the marina to visit a few shops and a cafe. We also stopped at the i-site and discovered the White Island tour had run today so it looked promising for our trip tomorrow. We tried to book to visit this Maori show after speaking to the information centre lady who couldn't recommend it enough and spoke highly of a light show the experience included. Unfortunately we couldn't actually book it because they didn't answer the phone so in the end we walked there to discover no sign of life whatsoever. You can book online but you pay and then they contact you to let you know if it's happening and if it's not you get a refund, something we didn't really want to do. Instead we returned to the van 2 hours later optimistic that we could at least drive out of town somewhere to do something instead. It wasn't meant to be because the van still wouldn't start. It was time to call the rental company who phoned the AA to get a technician out to us. Nick had to pay for this and if the reason it wouldn't start wasn't our fault, e.g. we hadn't left the lights on, then we would get a refund. It was a scary moment of hoping there was actually a fault. It only took 20 minutes for AA to come and after jump starting us and testing the battery he determined that it was indeed faulty and needed replacing, phew we get a refund! The rental company sorted it all out for us and within an hour we were sat at a garage having a new battery put in. That's both our main battery and house battery we've had replaced and I'm so so pleased we rented because I'd hate to know how much this would cost if we had to pay for this ourselves. Our van has a new lease of life and after the mechanic tested it quite a few times we were on our way back to the same carpark we left only an hour before. Luckily we can stay 2 nights here so we parked up again in a spot that would be in the sun in the morning to ensure the engine would start and we wouldn't be late for our tour. We've spent our afternoon relaxing with books and playing games. Although it was a pain the battery broke I'm so glad it happened on a day when we didn't have any set plans so we could get it all sorted straight away. The van has done 40,000km shy of 600,000 so it was bound to have some issues at some point when we are renting it for so long. Fingers crossed it's the last time we have to visit a mechanic!Read more