No fish at Burrum Heads. Started the journey inland towards Carnarvon Gorge. Spent a night at Waruma Dam, there are big Barra stocked in this water but we didn't come across any. Then onto Moura and Dawson River to camp the night before the run into the Gorge. A nice camp spot that wasn't in our camping book but was right on the river, had toilets and showers and was free! The recent floods made a mess of the area but you couldn't tell except for the high water mark that was only two feet from the top of the toilet block. Got and earlyish start and headed to Rolleston to fuel up before heading down the Carnarvon road. All fueled up we took off, feeling pretty happy with ourselves......
The roads were long and straight, the sun was shining, we crossed a small flood weir with success, took in the remains of an american airforce plane that went down in the area in the 1940's, then came the second water crossing. On reflection I (Ruth) took the water crossing with a little too much vigor but we came out the other side and kept going fine - for about 500m. We slowed down for a macropod on the road, dropped down the gears and Lulu decided not to go anymore. We thought that maybe a bit of water got into the distributor, so we dried it out, hit it with some WD40 and spent about 3 hours trying to get her going. Not much joy. We could get her to idle sort of but she wouldn't hold. Brons put out the thumb and headed the extra 10km into the Gorge with a family to make some calls. Ruth and the children stayed with Lulu. 2 and a half hours later it was getting dark and Ruth assumed that Bronson must be walking back from the Gorge. A friendly farmer asked if Ruth was ok and said he'd drive down the road looking for Brons. Yep Brons was walking and running at times back to Lulu and the farmer picked him up. In the meanwhile the towie showed up to hook up Lulu and take us back to Rolleston.
Greg our tow truck man was happy for us to park up in his truck yard for the night so we made camp in his shed. Not Carnarvon Gorge but at least we were dry and we only had to share it with a few cane toads, mice and some green tree frogs in the toilet.
It was a sleepless night worrying about what's wrong with Lulu and the neighbour that had his tunes pumping out till sunrise. Brons got to work on Lulu first thing and had some help from one of the other fellas staying in the yard. He wasn't much help but he tried none the less. There doesn't appear to be enough spark so we reckon the coil has died (again! we replaced this before we left). Did a scrounge around all the abandoned cars of Rolleston and found a coil but it didn't fix our problems. So now we wait, we will head to Emerald on Monday morning in the tow truck again to get ourselves a new coil. We have tracked on down and hopefully that will get us going again. If not then we will be in a place that has mechanics and we can get an assessment done.
All we've got to say is thank fudge we got the ultimate road side package with RACT! Everyone has been really helpful (except for all the cars that passed Brons walking and didn't pull up and offer him a ride), Greg is letting us stay at his yard till Monday. The RACT would cover accommodation but we're not really keen on leaving Lulu with all our gear in a truckies yard unsupervised.
So we're a bit bummed out but we'll survive. It's our two year anniversary today - not quite the way we planned on spending it but oh well it's all part of our adventure and lets face it it was going to happen sooner or later! Take care and we'll keep you posted once we get to Emerald.
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