It’s road trip time in our van Sandy which we bought only a few days ago. We take it for a drive for the first time to the King’s Cross area to see Kev off as he is leaving us for 3 weeks to see the east coast of Australia with Anna. We say our goodbyes and head straight to Newcastle. Sandy drives like a beauty, despite not having power steering. It’s very exciting when we arrive there at about 1 am in the morning and finding a place to sleep for the night. Eventually we find this car park by Bar Beach which is dead quiet. We park up and get ourselves ready to go to sleep with three people sharing a double sized mattress…cosy. The only way we would fit in was to have to people with their heads facing the boot and the other person in the middle facing the opposite way.

The night went by and we all had a good nights sleep. The strange thing was when we woke up the car park was getting fuller and there were tons of joggers going past the van as we lay there. As we were next to the sea, we went for a early morning swim. It’s surprising how many people are up at 7:30am to go for a swim in the sea. As we have no fixed abode, we head to the public showers to clean ourselves up. We then went for a spot of lunch and chilled out on Dixon beach before. We didn’t stay for long in Newcastle as there wasn’t a huge amount that interested there, so we left late at night and drove towards Coffs Harbour. We got tired on the way and stopped in a rest area called Buladelah on the motorway where we slept for the night.

The following day, we wake up nice and early and drive to Forster via a scenic route through Myall Lakes, Seal Rocks, Pacific Palms and Booti Booti National Park. We arrive at Forster by midday and find a supermarket to get some lunch in. When we got back to the van, we tried to start it up but it wouldn’t start. It looked like that battery was flat to us which wasn’t good news as it could mean we might need a new battery which would be expensive. Luckily for us, a nice woman in the pet shop nearby offered a jump start.

The jump start worked and we were on the road again but we only drove another few hundred metres before we saw a carpet shop offering cheap mats which would be perfect to lay on the floor of our van to make more homely. Surprise surprise, after we bought the mats and attempted to start the car it wouldn’t! It was really frustrating but the person from the carpet shop offered a jump start. This time we drove straight to a k-mart in case it wouldn’t start again. K-mart has lots of car parts including a battery and the plan was to replace ourselves if the car wouldn’t start again. As expected when we tried to restart the car outside it wouldn’t start. So we get out the screwdrivers and start replacing the battery. We found that the contacts of the battery in the car were covered in some sort of blue powder so we clean it off and swap it for a new one. The new one never worked so we got a refund and popped the old one back it. We didn’t know what else to do, so we  just thought we would just try start the engine anyway, and hey presto, it worked!! This time we never turned off the engine and drove straight to Port Macquarie.