MOOMINS M.C.

The last couple of weeks have been very eventful and a bit of an emotional roller coaster.
They will take a few installments to document and will hopefully make for some slightly interesting reading.
Long and short of it, my surgery has been cancelled and therefore all the plans I'd made for the coming months / next year have all gone out of the window.
Poo....

So, the Grampians Gonzo Grapple With Gravity Melbourne Cup Camping Spectacular has come and gone and not without its mishaps.
I managed to fight gravity rather successfully, although it did it's best to bring me down.
Keli on the other hand lost the grapple on a couple of occasions and at one point had to get escorted back to his tent by his girlfriend and son.
It was always going to be a bit of a test of man and the new machine, but just how literal that was going to be was another matter.
The 1st of November was to be when I planned my departure to the Grampians Mountains, but not long after I hit the freeway the car started running hot.
I drove on for a little while trying to sus out what the outcome and cause could be.
It turned out that my dodgy radiator was more than dodgy, it was proper stuffed.
It just couldn't dissipate the heat generated by the engine working harder on the freeway.
So I turned around and headed back to Melbourne, full of dismay and frustration as I planned to get up the next morning and take some sunrise photos.
The next day I was hoping to be able to get the radiator replaced and to continue on my delayed journey.
I pulled a favour with the people who do our radiator repairs for work and managed to get back on the road the following afternoon.
Snorkmaiden and I drove to her folks farm near Navarre where we enjoyed some of her mum's down home farm cookin' in between driving the boundary fences in the diesel ute, checking out the alpacas that guard the sheep from foxes, rounding up stray lambs, á la Mcleods Daughters and watching Sex and the City on pay tv.
That night there was nearly as much rain as they'd had on the farm for the previous month and it was a precursor to the next couple of days.
Saturday we met up with the rest of the crew and started to contemplate just how wet this camping trip was going to be.
I'd picked out a beaut spot I'd been to on New Year's Eve nearly 2 years ago and it turned out to be the only spot not reopened since the fires that had ravaged the area just two months later.
We ended up going to a different site way up in the mountains, right up in the very clouds that were drenching the rest of the Grampians.
The fog ( read clouds ) was so thick we had to crawl along idling in 2nd gear at times.
The downpour abated just long enough for us to pitch our tents, set up the big communal tarpaulin and cook some dinner over the fire.
We managed to get a chicken crucified and started the cooking process.
All was going well until the rain came down again, only this time it was torrential!
It ended up being two and a half inches of rain that day and the bottom of my tent felt like the top of a water bed, luckily I had an air mattress so I figured if we got flooded we could just sort of float on top.
The entire night was spent huddled in the tents, listening to the lashing rain and the thunder claps, counting the seconds between the blinding flashes and the deafening cracks.
Even had a tree come down a couple of hundred metres from the camp site the next morning, thankfully it didn't hit anyone, although a falling tree did kill a camper in his tent in another part of that state that night.









To be continued.........


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