Mechanical Failure

Things break down. No matter how prepared and well maintained it is, sometimes things just happen. And what makes it worse is that only the day before it happened Ali expressed a concern about breaking down in the middle of nowhere, and my response was something like, ‘it’s a two year old diesel that has been serviced regularly, it will go on forever’. Needless to say I am being reminded of that at least three times a day and I am quite sure that I will be reminded of it on a regular basis for the rest of my life.

So, what happened? Well, to start with, we were descending a fairly steep hill coming out of the southern Flinders Ranges heading for Port Augusta when I realised that we had no brakes on the caravan.

Fortunately this turned out to be a loose wire in the trailer plug. Fifteen minutes and a bit of electrical tape later, normality was restored and we were back on the road. After over two months on the road and a few thousand k’s, a loose wire seemed very minor. But, little did I know how the rest of the day would pan out.

Later in the day we made a lunch stop on the way to camp at Wilpena Pound and noticed what looked like some sort of oil over the back of the car and the front of the camper. My first thought was that the jerry can full of diesel on the front of the camper must have sprung a leak. Turned out to be full and leak free. I looked around and couldn’t see anything else amiss so put it down to a can of spray oil in the toolbox going off. So, after lunch, we jumped back in and carried on up the road.

On arriving at Wilpena campground, the clutch started to feel a bit ‘sticky’, and by the time we had stopped to pay our camping fees, we had no clutch left and I couldn’t get the car into gear at all. It was only then that it dawned on me the that oil on the back of the car and all over the caravan now was our clutch fluid, and for the non mechanically minded, a clutch works better with the fluid in the hydraulic system rather than spread across the front of whatever you are towing.

We managed to get the caravan into a camping spot and were able to unhitch the car and move it out of the way, but after that it was going nowhere.

Fortunately we still had mobile phone coverage, so after a call to the RACQ, a tow truck was organised to come and get us the following day around lunchtime and take us to Hawker, only about 50ks away, for repairs. This was an excellent result as it still gave us time to get up early the next morning and do a walk into Wilpena Pound.

Early morning walk completed, and as promised the tow truck turned up and carted us away. RACQ covered the cost of the tow plus our accomodation in Hawker and even for a hire vehicle while we waited for the required part to be shipped in from Melbourne.

Now, I hope I am not jinxing myself here as we are still waiting for the part to arrive as I write this, but so far so good. I consider myself to be very much a ‘glass half full person’, so I like to take to positives out of every situation rather than ponder the negatives. So, the positives as I see them are:

• We could have really been in the middle of nowhere with no phone service, but now we will be leaving here with a newly serviced clutch.
• We got up earlier than we would have to do our walk. It was awesome, no one else around, sun only just coming up, frost on the ground when we got up the hill, beautiful.

• We got a refund on our camping fees.
• We got three nights free accomodation in town.
• We explored the area in our hire car and found the most awesome scenery that we would have otherwise have missed.

• And finally I get to watch England v Belgium on the big TV instead of on the iPad in the caravan.

All is well, and if we break down again I hope the experience is as positive as this one.

So, update now a day later. Car is fixed and we will be on the road again in the morning. This morning though we met a couple from Tasmania in the cafe and got chatting. They had also broken down and their car was in the garage. Sadly their experience at the moment is slightly less positive than ours. They don’t have the same sort of cover that we do, so no free accomodation or car hire for them. Their mechanical failure is also rather more serious and expensive than ours and the vehicle needs to go to Adelaide to be repaired. That alone is a recovery fee of over $2k before they even open the bonnet.

Needless to say we are counting our lucky stars that that isn’t us.

Moral of the story: get the best breakdown recovery you can before leaving home. You might still breakdown, but at least they will get you home.