On the Road - Day 2 & 3

Today we made the move with the intention of getting to Charles Darwin Reserve to catch up with the others. We started out with no problems except in our last minute chat with the neighbours, we forgot to double check and of course forgot something - our pillows. This necessitated a stop over in a suburban shopping centre, which of course meant lunch and so our late departure to the bush! We're hopeless..
We had an untroubled trip and settled down for the night about 30 kms north from a small town Wubin, 272 north-east from Perth, in the Jibberding Nature Reserve which, in case you have problems, is on the corner of the Rabbit Proof Fence and the Great Northern Highway. It is a small rest area off the road in the scrub and provided us with a quiet place away from the roar of the huge road trains that ply the road on a regular basis. We got to count the planes (20) and satellites (7) in the beautiful clear starry night next to Mark's A+ fire.
T'was fortunate we had a fire because the temp dropped to -1 and we certainly felt it.

Day 3
We woke to a very chilly dawn but got the fire going and after breakfast started to pack up. However, as is true to our form, disaster struck and I wasn't able to open the Ranger door with the electronic dit-dit. We had a completely flattened battery - not even a delicate cough! No problem, we were equipped with an alternate battery in the back and of course had two in the camper. Famous last thoughts. Firstly we tried the auxiliary battery with thoughts of Jack Absalom's advice when caught in these situations. No we didn't need a can of beer to douse the fire, or string the torch batteries in series to get 12Vs; we had everything we needed. Unfortunately our car battery thought otherwise and we could not jump start using the auxiliary battery. Fortunately for us there was a family camped near us who generously disconnected their car from their caravan and tried jump starting with their car. Still no sign of recovery from our battery. We began to think that maybe the alternator had the bomb as we were unable to get a thing out of the battery.
Luckily for us they had phone coverage ( yes they were with Telstra and of course we weren't - lesson 1 learnt! ). Using their phone we rang Toyota Assist (Sydney based) who asked for location and the nearest street to our location. Our reply must have made no sense at all - Corner of Rabbit Proof Fence and Great Northern Highway. But after getting our email and phone details, the lovely lady advised us that we should have someone with us hopefully within the hour. Despite Mark's protestations that no one could phone or email us and Wongan Hills or Moora were both a reasonable distance away we had to phone off and patiently wait. Maybe if we'd phone the RACWA they would have been able to get Mike? from Wubin Towing to come and rescue us! Hind site is a wonderful thing. So at around 11am we set off to sit at the junction of Rabbit Proof Fence and GN Highway with our hot coffee and a good book. Having the whole day to sit down and knock off a book is a marvellous way for me to spend a day in my holidays and I enjoyed the privilege. Mark wasn't as keen and by about 1pm decided to go back to the car and see what he could do. As we were given a solar cell with the camper, he decided to attach it to the battery.
After several trips back and forth to check up on my situation ( more pages had been read), he decided at 4pm, to check the battery, and found that we now had a 12 volt reading. Gingerly starting the car we had success and after quickly demobilizing we then had to make the decision to carry on forward to catch up with the rest of the group or head back to Wubin to let our rescuers know that after around 7 hours we wouldn't need their help. Given that some poor mechanic may have been on his way from lord knows where, we thought we should at least cut his journey down asap. Those in Sydney were horrified to hear that we had finally got back to civilization without their mechanic and with many apologies we thanked them and wondered if centralization of services over in the East Coast was a practical solution to WA people!
The upside of this little adventure is we had the most delicious hamburger at the roadhouse before we took off to Charles Darwin Reserve some 150 ks away to the North. We arrived there in the pitch black at around 6.30 where we put the camper up quickly and joined the others with a hot cuppa and biscuit, underneath a huge full moon and slowly descending temperatures.