right from the start of this year we said we were going. plain and simple right......wrong heres how it went down.
we started a resto on our vehical we decided to do in. the trusty old 62 splitty pannle van.it use to be pink with sign writting all over it.
the restoration was going great until we found a little dent in the nose.....litle as in a monster crease :jesus but we pushed on with the resto i worked on it every afternoon well into most nights for 5 to 6 months.
when i thought id finally finished it, my mate calls to tell me he use a trolly jack to jack it up on the jack point. and the jack had slipped off and went throught the sill under the double doors. this was one week before DOVW!!!!!
but i got it done.
so the day came to leave, we had checked the bus over and we looked right to go....we hit the road and the speedo wasnt working, which was fine cause we werent planning on breaking and land speed records.
we got as far as mittagong and it started, it must have been an omen of things to come, we lost a brand new hubcap. we kept checking the bus the whole way down and it was looking good. an hour past albury we had the biggest lightning storm ive ever seen the it hammerd down with rain.
the bus has been converted to 12 volt so driving at night with the lights and wipers on didnt worry us.
finally we reach melbourne 12:45pm, now i tell ya you fella's down there have got some crazy city driving rules going on thats for sure. and we almost rear ended a tram :o
we get to flinders street back packers and park the car on the street planning to move it before the meter parking started. we then decided to hit a pub in town, and we couldnt get into any of em not one !!! so we went back to our accomidation and figured out if we snuck down the fire stairs we could get into the club downstairs 😉 2:00am saturday mornin.
after a few beverages we headed to our room and for a reason not yet know to us we decided to go check on the bus cause something didnt "feel" right, any way we get to the kombi and theres oil under it. now this bus is one of the few that leaks next to no oil so this worried us. we pop the rear hatch and there was oil EVERY WHERE !!!!! the oil filler tube thingo had come off and the motor pushed oil all through the engine bay. (happend between the servo at the industrial and hitting town)
so were cleaning up the oild and putting coins in the meter the between my friend and i we forgot to pu a coin in and a tickett dude slaps a ticket under the front screen. but it was all good because he came around the back of the bus saw what we were doing and canceld our ticket.
so we've now traveld over 1000km had no sleep. the 3rd member of our road trip crew has been sleeping all this time, wakes up and sez "lets go shopping" then ask's why are you guys so dirty. we tell her the story get cleaned up and hit the shops.
the 3rd member then wants to go to brunswik *sp* street we say sure why not. when we get in to drive the radio didnt work, no biggie we twist and tapped it in anyway lol. so driving on our way there we notice the head light plunger is out but with no light :duh: so we push the plunger in and the bus dies...i mean dies no dash lights no nothing when we hit the key. this happens to happen on a slight up hill at an intersection.
so i get out and push the bus to the sude of the road. we ring up NRMA and tell em what happend and they laughed and said "your in melbourne try calling the RACV" so we give them a yell and they make us sign up with em.
the guy arrives after an hour which we didnt think was too bad 👍 he does some tests and tells us the generator is on the way out asks us where we were heading and that and then tells us we should be ok just not to let the radio go when the cars not on.
so we head to st kilda to camp out 4 the night and as we pull up she dies again. so we make some calls and decide to test the regulator. we go to take the fan belt off the see if the generator was spinning when we ark the regulator and it turn out the RAVC dude did the pully up with his rattle gun :vader so we call em again and get em out to undo it. we test the regulator to see if the generator was working and the regulator was cactus. so i wrangle up a regulator but we cant get it unless were at the show and by now our phones are all going flat. and we were sleeping in the car so we couldnt charge em up.
so i went for a walk dow port melbourne main street looking for a internet cafe........there isnt one !!! so as a last resort i went in to the gelato shop where 2 nice chicks were working and i managed to talk em in to letting me leave ours phones on charge there 😉
we then made the executive decision to get more beverages and call the RAVC dudes again in the moring so we could buy a new battery off them and run the bus straight off the battery just to get us to DOVW so i could get the regulator.
in the morning we called the RAVC.and thats what we did we drove straight there no light no radio no wipers. we get there walk straight in get the regulator go back out to the bus only to find we've lost our phillips head screw driver ?!?@#?#$ luckily enough the melbourne crew came to the rescue with akean1 lending us some tools.
so we fit it up and test the regulator the new one worked fine but it was our gene that had died :alien
so we weighed up our options of getting another one then and there( snow flakes chance in hell) then we figured that on a kombi its not the quickest job to do with limited tools. then there was the option of driving as far as we could on the battery before it got dark.
lucky for us borris lent us another battery and a trickle charger. so we left and powered through to albury were right as i said lets get some petrol the bus coughed splattered and ran out of fuel (petrol guage doesnt work either) so we pushed it back to the servo we past and they were shut. we then walked to the other side of town and got some petrol.made it to a hotel/pub (the boomer or something) more beverages were drunk we ate a good feed.
then we drove home. on the batteries.
deffinatly a trip were not forgetting soon. big thanks to the melbourne crew and a shout out to jenz and splittychick. which im sorry i didnt recognise your face, im terrible with faces :bounce
pyr0 flame-on
4,457 posts · joined Mar 2003 ·
Founding member of the C'town Rat-Pack
