Sometimes life can hand you some tough cards and it seems they always come in 3’s.
We had a lovely quiet week in Barwon Heads awaiting the boat to Tasmania, then on the night before we were set to leave Bruce scratched his eye (cornea) so the morning of our departure day we headed into Geelong to a private emergency to get him looked at… Luckily being private we were in and out quickly with a couple of scripts and reassurance it would heal within 48hours.
We thought ok great, back to the caravan to finish packing and cleaning the van ready to board the Spirit of Tasmania. We were on the road heading to Melbourne still with plenty of time to reach our destination but it was never going to be that simple, firstly there was a crash on the Westgate Bridge but hey no worries still had plenty of time get into port of Melbourne, get through that no problem but gosh the traffic seems heavy for a Sunday (that was due to a festival on in St Kilda).
Suddenly the car radio started intermittently turning on and off, we thought “that’s weird” then Col noticed every light on the dash come on, battery, ABS, oil and the list goes on. Ok something is seriously wrong now so we need to find somewhere to pull over… we pull over the car shuts down unable to restart and appears completely stuffed cannot be jump started off the second battery. Col rings a battery mob who said it’s most likely the alternator so we ring RACV who would you believe (we find this out later) had a complete system failure and were not answering any calls. Col in his problem-solving ways managed to jump start the car using our batteries from the van but we only made it a few kms down the road before the car started failing again, thankfully there was a service station within our break down distance so we ducked in there and Col bought a brand new battery with the hope we could at the very least just make the 6kms to the boat and worry about the rest once we made it to Tassie.
The car started and with fingers crossed we started the journey, the traffic was horrendous but we could see the boat and our hopes were high! Get to the entry gates at Station Pier (Spirit Of Tasmania entrance) and the car completely stalls with no hope of revival it was cooked. With no chance of moving and completely blocking all the other vehicles from getting on the boat the security arranged for a tow vehicle to move us a couple of hundred meters so the other cars could get through.
At this stage RACV we’re still uncontactable. Hours passed by then we watched the Spirit of Tasmania leave the dock as we got onto RACV and arranged a tow truck. By now it’s 8:00pm the tow had arrived the kids and I had booked a cab and the friendly people at Discovery Park Melbourne had kindly agreed to open for us to bring the van and stay till we knew what was happening.
On another positive note, we contacted the Spirit of Tassie to let them know our situation and they were fabulous so booked us again on the following Saturday which was the last available departure date before January… phew!
By the time we’d set up the caravan it was around 10:00pm we were all completely shattered and we were just thankful that the day was over and a new day would hopefully bring some answers and positivity… unfortunately the nightmare had only just begun and not in the way you would think.
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