The Recliner
Our new caravan has finally arrived!
More correctly, we have now taken delivery of our new caravan that Crusader had built far sooner than we expected, leaving us a little short on the final payment. Fortunately for us our dealer, Cameron Caravans SA, was willing to hold the van until we were ready. This turned into several months, so we are extremely grateful to the team.
Cameron’s had actually taken delivery of something in the order of 50 vans at that time. I don’t know what caused this, be it a mix up on the orders or a sudden burst of production by the manufacturer in Melbourne, but I think it was part of the reason they were not overly concerned by our delay… they had plenty of other vans to deliver!
Anyway, on Thursday, Feb 22nd, we swapped our Kingsman – going to Cameron’s on consignment – with the new Musketeer Recliner. Having not sold the Kingsman was a large part of the reason we didn’t initially have the funds for the new van.
Everything went to plan during the handover, and getting the van home was not a problem… however, all was not so great when we got home. After we pulled up we noticed water pouring onto the ground near the rear water tank.
Since we were still hooked up, we headed back to Cameron’s to see what was going on. Fortunately, it was simply that the tanks were very, very full and the incline of our street was enough to tip the level above the overflow pipes. All good.
We spent the afternoon loading the van for a trip to Lake Bonney to test it out.
What we hadn’t intended to do was test out the air conditioning running on battery, but that’s what we did. When we parked up, I had plugged the van into the power cable that was previously powering the Kingsman. What I hadn’t realised is that Ryan (our youngest) has unplugged that cable to charge up one of the e-bikes. It was into the 30’s, the A/C and fridge were running on battery – unbeknownst to us – and everything seemed fine. It actually wasn’t until about 7:30 that evening that we started hearing a beeping coming from inside. The batteries had run flat, unsurprisingly under the conditions. Anyway, a couple of hours with everything switched off and the batteries had recovered. Test complete. The A/C can run for a couple of hours on the battery system.
Off to Lake Bonney!
