Maryborough and lessons learnt

The guide book went on to say ...

“Keep climbing further north until you reach Maryborough - an historical gem of a town filled with preserved colonial streets and heritage architecture. Grab a meal at one of the vintage pubs in the wharf district before heading to Fraser Island”

I don’t know who wrote this but they haven’t been there in a few years. Maryborough struck me as a town down on its luck. Yes, it was only one-off 3 ports on the east coast of Australia for some time mid-1800s and it also had huge industry with rail works, but now its rather sad. Many of the pubs are empty and up for sale. The “Central Business District” has a large proportion of empty shops - apparently due to the development of the shopping mall just out of town.

However, the information centre was amazing and so helpful. We were given details of a free campsite for self contained RVs (recreation vehicle) and given numerous guide books for the area. Tomorrow, at 9:00, there is a free guided tour of the town whose claim to fame is that Pamela Lyndon Travers, the author of Mary Poppins, was born there. She was born in the Bank House, her father was the bank manager.

We wandered around the town, had beers in a pub ... good beer, awful pub, looked around the gardens and the war memorials. There was a jasmine hedge, maybe 20 yards long, all in flower. The perfume was picked up on the breeze and was easily noticeable over 50yards away.

By the time we got back to Bertha, we’d been away for maybe 4 hours. When we went in, the lights came on for 20 seconds and then went out for 20 seconds, then on, then off. Our first nigh of “free camping”;off the grid had not started well. Fortunately we had torches and instruction manuals for (almost) all appliances and control systems.

The problem appears to have been our naivety about the fridge that can run from 240v, 12v or gas. When we are driving along it can only be on 12v. Previously, when we have stopped, we have always hooked up to mains. Today we had left the fridge working off 12v while we explored Maryborough. Despite Bertha’s age, she has a modern high tech solar panel system, controller and a huge deep cycle battery that must weigh a ton and gives me insight as to why she sometimes struggles up steep hills. However, that system is not sufficient to run a fridge especially when the van is parked under a tree to give it shade. The ice box had defrosted and the whole thing was warm.

We had been shown how to get the gas boiler alight, but not how to get the fridge to work from gas. Was it one and the same system? The one set of information we had for the fridge showed burners and piezoelectric starters .... but for a different fridge.

There was nothing for it but to knock on the door of a van that looked similar and hope that the owner knew more than we did. Unfortunately, the. An I chose was owned by a woman travelling on her own and she was, initially, quite suspicious of me. Once she had decided that my intentions were OK we had a long discussion about 3-way fridges and concluded hers was different to ours and she was of little help.

Back to the van and use Google to try and find out what the fridge model was and find a user manual for it. Once that was done it was quite straightforward to switch the fridge to gas, take the load off the battery that then allowed a couple of lights to work ... but not the water pump. Bun was so confident in my findings and plan of what to do, she vacated Bertha, taking our passports, flight tickets and copy of our will, just incase I was wrong and blew myself up.

Despite not having the fan running, the night was not too hot or stuffy. We didn’t sleep well because there was a bird that sang from dusk until dawn (a night lark?) and, I suspect, a small troop of monkeys that spent most of the night in the tree under which we had parked, throwing nuts onto the tin roof of Bertha. OK, so there are no monkeys .... but it was more than gravity!Read more