Second Year of living in Fregon

| Xmas | | Smoking Damper | Alice Springs | Journey to Adelaide | Very sick Valiant | Motocross Madness | Victor Harbor visit | Those peskie rabbits | Road Kill | Mintabie and the Ghost | A new rifle

Very Sick Valiant returns bravely to Fregon

Well here we are up here in the red center of Australia, we decided to stay here after coming back from the September holidays. It was such a mammoth journey taking over 20 hours of nonstop driving. We left Adelaide at 3 PM with the car packed to the max. I had my wallet stolen outside of Mum house. It was my own stupid fault as I had left it in the car and had just popped in to say good-bye to mum. However stole it would have fun with the $150 (which was petrol money for the return trip) and we really had to drain the bank dry to get back to Fregon.

Bruce hadn't had time to fix the radiator so every half hour we had to refill it with water it worked out to over 40 stops. We had also put on extra lights because we could see the Black Angus cows that were outside of Cooper Pedy and at times the only times you could spot them were the red reflections of their eyes in the headlights. The car looked like a UFO with the 9 extra driving lights across the top of the packrack on the roof of the car. In fact the highways department was worried about melting the bitumen on the roads with all of the heat coming off them. But Bruce thought that I was safer driving when I could actually see. It rained all they way to Port Augusta and the windscreen wiper fuse blew so Bruce had to fix that in the middle of the night.

The car was loaded up with everything including the kitchen sink

When we finally drove into Cooper Pedy at 6:30am the next morning Bruce announced that the water pump could go no further so we had to wait until the service station opened that sold valiant water-pumps. So we had a couple of hours sleep bought the pump and off we went, we stopped at a roadside stop and took off the radiator, fan belt and dead water pump. All to the amazement of some English tourists who hadn't seen anything quite like this. Bruce put in the new pump replaced all of the other bits and we arrived at Marla at 11 am and we still had 2-3 hours of dirt to go to Fregon.

The corrugations were not as bad as the ones we had seen two weeks before because there had been some rain and there were puddles on the sides of the road and there wasn't one car that we passed. When we finally got to Fregon at 1pm we discovered that we were the first ones through as the roads had been closed for Men's Business. Bruce unloaded the bikes as we had bought a 90cc for David and a 50cc with sidecar for James in Adelaide. David couldn't wait to get on his so even though they were very tired they put on their helmets, gloves and off they went on the sidecar hanging out like all of the big guys on TV. However peace was not for long because David would yell at James to hang out this way or move back. In the end so that they would kill one another we strapped a big bottle of water as the passenger and then they can't get mad with one another.

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