Gold Coast
After doing the 4 Desert Tracks, we’ve decided that a
weeks’ R&R is needed on the Gold Coast before we return to the hustle and bustle
of Sydney.
This trip doing the 4 desert tracks (Savannah Way, Tanami
Road, Oodnadatta Track and Strzelecki Track) we’ve done 4,224kms on dirt. The
Strzelecki Track was the worst. The road consisted of not just hard dirt, but
also large rocks and endless corrugations of rocks.
However I have to say on our previous trips with the
Touareg, we were shaken a lot more in the car than in the LandCruiser. We can
tell this as the inside of the van has obviously had a hard time from the
corrugations.
The latest proof of this is when we arrived here on the
Gold Coast I thought I had better clean the solar panels on the roof of the van
as they haven’t been cleaned since before Broome. When I climbed up the first
thing I noticed was that the rear panel had shattered glass. It looks like a
broken windscreen! There is a point of impact on it when we, or a passing
road-train, has launched a rock onto the roof. Kedron tell us that this has
happened a few times before and it’s a risk of doing really bad dirt roads.
So we have to take the van there tomorrow to get a new
solar panel fitted. Another expense!
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