Day 25 - Lost and found

Date: 
Monday, July 15, 2024

This morning whilst going for a pee, I walked in front of the car and looked down at the bull bar because there was something black wedged in the top of it. When I grabbed it I couldn't believe that it was our GoPro camera that had sheared off its mounting bracket a few days ago. I don't know how it survived all of those corrugations from the last few days. It looks a bit worse for wear now but still seems to work OK.

We left the Desert Queen Baths campsite around 830am as usual, heading back over the tracks we had driven a few days ago, with our eventual destination being Georgia Bore where we were camping at again tonight.

We were driving the Ranger quite tentatively,  due to our suspension repair and hoping it would hold. After stopping a couple of times to check that the lock nut was holding, I found that it was starting to come loose, so we would need to do some more work to try and get it to hold. At our morning tea stop, after having a better look, we could see that the bolt threads were not long enough to fit into the nylon nut, so we decided to use some plumbers tape and Loctite on the bolt as well as bashing the spanner with a mallet, to get the nut as tight as possible.

Just before we were about to move off, one of the other cars was having issues with a shock absorber and it needed to be replaced. This took about 45 minutes, so we had some lunch whilst we were waiting. It was mid afternoon by the time we got moving again, so we hesitantly drove the Ranger back through the corrugations, heading towards Georgia Bore.

We started to get some quite bad squeeking/clunking sounds coming from the back suspension, but nothing we could obviously see as our fix to the nut and bolt seemed to be holding.

Getting into camp, there was another large tour group already camped there. Their tour guide was a friend of Wylie's, so he helped us to fit all of our cars into the various campsites still available. Whilst Wylie was directing us where to camp, we saw diesel leaking from under his car. It looks like a rock had flicked up and possibly punctured the tank. Wylie got under the car and rubbed a cake of soap over the hole as a temporary fix to seal the hole. Luckily it was his auxiliary fuel tank so he was able to drain most of the fuel into the main tank and jerry cans.

As we were both stressed and exhausted, it was a quick meal of Mug O Noodles and early to bed, after we had finished filling up our water tanks from the bore tap.

The Canning is starting to take its toll on the vehicles. Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day.