Saturday 25 June 2011

Casino - week1 – 11th–18th June 2011

We arrived at the RV Park at mid-afternoon Saturday to find that the ensuite also had a small store room attached and had a roof out over the front nearly large enough for a vehicle. The guy next door was washing his car despite warnings of impending rain. We set up and unpacked and did the run to Woolworths for groceries for the rest of the long weekend. Hey, we were right! By 8:30 it was fair pouring down out there.

Sunday was wet so we had a rest day, tucked up on an ensuite van site with a roofed area between us and the loo and all our gear stored safe and dry.

This place has an interesting concept in RV lifestyle. You rent a site for $130/wk and erect a manufactured home of (1 to 3 bedrooms @ $160k to $360k) with an on-site garage/s for the mobile home, car and boat. You may put in a small garden but don’t need to, all the lawns and hedges are trimmed whether you are in residence or off RVing. The less permanent sites are all angled so even the back-in ones are easier to get into than those in most caravan parks.

Casino on a wet public holiday Monday seemed a good time to check in at the RV Park for the rest of the fortnight. It seems this rain is causing major flooding along the coast and the higher peaks along the New England are recording some awful temperatures -9 degrees Celsius at Glen Innes.  We need to leave the van somewhere while we return to Maitland for the big event and this place with night time security patrols seems ideal. We checked out the Information Centre to get a few tips. Here we found a person with a great people skills and an interest in birds. So soon we were watching swans build nests in a wetland while lots of other birds paddled about. We even stopped and watched a quail do some personal grooming.

Tuesday was washing day with Anne doing some office work. On Wednesday we sorted out and stacked the gear so that we could get away early and leave the van ready for us when we got back in a few day’s time.

Early morning Thursday had us on the road without the van back to Maitland. Due to the rain and the road closures on the Pacific Highway we went down through Tenterfield, Armidale and Willow Tree. (Yeah, Glen Innes was there but we blew through there with the windows up and the heater on full. Then we sidestepped Tamworth too!) We were hearing news of large potholes all the way down and thought that we were doing OK dodging them as we drove. However on Friday we were told by the shoe fitter at Athletes Foot, whose partner usually does about $1000 per day in tyre and rim repairs, that he had done something like $20,000 before he knocked off and had a line of 22 cars to do – one pothole took the wheel right off a small sedan and another took out the entire front axle of a truck.



Perhaps it would have been better if these new Michelin tyres were fitted to the cars - yes those are spokes - no tube, no valves, etc


The new tyres in motion -wierd eh!

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