Belair and Happy Valley, sounds relaxing right. Well it was in the end but not without a fair bit of anxiety.
The Adelaide Hills quite lovely, picturesque trees, winding little roads, quaint strip shots spattered throughout. However, arriving at Belair National Park Caravan Park (again the only place we could stay at this time of year, with a big rig and a dog), the entrance to our camp site rather ominous. Fortunately, Brad is a great driver and we nestled into a lovely little bush camp to relax after the drive in.
The next day, we were off to Happy Valley to have the fabulous Bill build us a new radiator. "No worries" he said about getting the bus into his home workshop on the hill. "We have another bus camping here on our 10 acres". "Just call me when you get to the bottom of the driveway and I'll guide you up". My response...."sounds a little ominous Bill, how steep's the driveway?" No problem he says, you'll be right.
Well with a knowing run up we made it up the short steep incline "no worries". The problem was, once up the top, there was nowhere to go, nowhere to turn a 17 metre bus and trailer. Quite a saga of a day it was figuring how to get the bus in the workshop, and how to get out of here once finished without attempting a treacherous reverse down the driveway with the car/trailer on board. So with sheer determination, we unloaded the car and the trailer, managed to turn the bus, and Bill precariously drove our car trailer down the hill on his Ford sedan, only then realising the weight of the trailer and hence our concerns. No matter, we made it out safely in the end and were so very thankful to Bill for doing this job over Christmas and so obligingly.
With a lovely cool temperature gauge, off we head to Mannum SA by the Murray. It took a lot longer than planned to get out of the hills, forced to ignore the navigator every time we a strett witha tonne limit. At once stage we had been driving for about 40 minutes and only made it about 8kms closer to our destination.
Ahh the fun of living on a bus.
