Pelican 4X4 Hire Sucks!! Tell your friends!!

March 5

To start our day, we went to the car and our trusty mechanic was right.  The car wouldn’t start, so it required a phone call to the front desk to find someone with booster cables to get it going.  This meant that at 9 a.m. we started the car and we couldn’t turn it off until we were done our day trip, which ended around 5 p.m.  This also made it difficult for all of us, get out of the vehicle when checking out the sights, as it would mean leaving it unattended, running. 

To start the day, we went to Lake McKenzie to check out the sights.  However, with car issue we had to find the closest parking spot, and this led to a wrong turn, which lead to never actually seeing Lake McKenzie.  We thought we would just loop around, and apparently on Fraser Island there is no such thing as just looping around.  Maybe we will try again tomorrow.

We then bumped around the island, until we got to Seventy Five Mile Beach, where we could drive faster along the beach.  We went up to Indian Head, checked out the Champagne pools, the Mahano Shipwreck and drove past Eli Creek- as the tide was on it’s way up and we didn’t want to get stuck.  We can do that again tomorrow.

The ride at times was even more bumpy, than the day before.  And, because of the rain the potholes were even deeper.  With the commotion of the truck and getting Pearl sorted before leaving, lunch turned out to be sparse.  I had packed all the stuff for sandwiches, but no bread.  And I didn’t pack utensils for the potato salad.  Therefore, lunch was hummus wrapped in lettuce and we had to use the cucumbers to scoop the potato salad out.  So, I guess we could say we left our manners back at the apartment as well.

We had a few good laughs along the way. The battery in the truck continued to die as the day went on, so by around 3 o’clock we were losing power to operate all the extras in the truck.   Power windows, air conditioning, radio etc.  So, we triaged what we could use, forgot about the radio, stopped using the air con, and put the windows up when it was raining and down when it was not.  The most hilarious part about it was, the only way to get the windows up in the vehicle was to drive faster, to get enough juice in the battery to operate them.

Then, we got to the rainforest part of the trip.  The windows were up because it was raining, which meant the windows were fogging up with all our hot air in the truck (we even kept conversation to a minimum!).  So, Dan had to drive faster through the rough terrain to get enough power to use the defrost to clear the windshield.  There was something ironic about the whole thing.  We will see what tomorrow will bring!