Clare 23rd Dec

Thursday 23rd Dec
Burra, Clare and the Clare Valley

Today was one of those that you think to yourself “I shouldn’t have got up today”.
After leaving Burra for a leisurely scenic drive south through back country roads, I noticed the signal on our caravan electric brakes sensor was indicating that we didn’t have a connection, this meant no caravan brakes and we were travelling on steep winding roads dragging almost 3.5 tonne, not a good predicament. I carried out several basic checks suspecting a broken wire but had little success in locating anything and the problem had now become intermittent. Slowly we made Clare where we were fortunate enough to find an auto electrician available to have a look at the problem in 30 – 45 mins. About 2 hours later he was ready to help and then after another hour and half to two hours he finally located what turned out to be a very simple problem, a small screw had come loose and an earth wire just wasn’t earthing, simple but a nightmare to find, at least our caravan supplier said they were quite happy to reimburse us.
Then I did a dumb thing. Underway again we detoured up a side road following a sign indicating freshly picked cherries and then drove up a driveway to the orchard where I managed to clip an overhanging tree limb with our roll out awning. Adding to the stress of almost tearing our awning away from the van, if I didn’t have low range in the cruiser I could never have turned around at the driveway end, as it turned out it took me about half an hour of tight manoeuvring held up a dozen customers coming in and in the process I ran over their wheel barrow, then discovered they had run out of cherries.
By this time I was quite stressed and very upset with my stupidity, especially as I couldn’t blame anyone else, (although David or Nancy was distracting me). So we drove out onto the highway and booked into the nearest caravan park for Christmas and then spent the next few hours carrying out temporary repairs so we could at least use the awing and there was also the added risk of the whole thing coming off as we drove if wasn’t secured, be interesting to see how we get on with insurance repairs in the new year.