Kombi Blog

Seeing that our last day in Coober Pedy was a Sunday we thought we would visit one of the underground Churches and attend a service. One of the closest and later morning services was the Coober Pedy Revival Church at 10.15am – so we went there. The service was a little different to what [...]

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Uluru – Day 10
The night underground allowed us an early start on what turned out to be a 10 hour trip (including stops) from Coober Pedy to Uluru, crossing over from South Australia into Northern Territory – our third Australian State. The trip to Uluru was almost uneventful, we clocked up 3000km since leaving home, [...]

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We woke kind of early to go out to Uluru and we must say that the ‘Rock’ is truly impressive, and certainly a spiritual and awe inspiring experience. There is just something very special about Uluru and I don’t think you could ever get tired of looking at it or standing in it’s presence.

Uluru was [...]

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Uluru – Day 12
Well it was up early today at 5.45am to head out to see the Sun rise over Uluru, it was cold and dark and the viewing area wasn’t as good as the sunset, apparently they are building a new 20 million dollar viewing area but this not open yet. The colours are [...]

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Day 13
Today we had a rest day which meant sleeping in a little and doing a few house keeping things like washing and a tune up on the kombi. We also hit the souvenir shops and brought some t-shirts and hats.
We finished the night by hiring a fire bin for $5, toasting marshmallows and thanks [...]

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We are certainly getting better at packing up for it didn’t take long to get everything ready, trying to get onto the Internet turned out to be a waist of 30 minutes, despite paying for an hour access ($10) the phones lines were down and so no Internet. By the time we filled up at [...]

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Today marks the start of our third week, we cannot believe that two weeks have passed or what we have fitted in and there is still so much more to see and do.
The Rim Walk was on the agenda today, so it was up at 7.30am to start the walk before the heat of the [...]

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It was up early again to pack up the Kombi and head to Alice Springs. According to Google Maps we only had around 300km to travel, of which 100km was a dirt road. We gave the dirt road a try and after 500 meters we decided we would stick to the sealed roads and do [...]

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We got up today to go and check out the East McDonald Ranges with a visit Stanley Chasm. This was a short drive of just under 50km and even a shorter walk of just 15 minutes to the Chasm which is only about 20 – 30 meters long. Like everyone else in Alice Springs we [...]

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We decided we needed a sleep in and rest today so we had no real plans till 4pm when we would be picked up and taken to ride some Camels along the Todd river.
Melina (our budding artist) went off and did a four hour course in painting with water colors (she came back with an [...]

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Greetings everyone
We have had some trouble with Shirl - strong indication that it’s a result of opal fuel we had use coming from Uluru.
Yesterday I spent all day trying to sort out the problem, checked the vales first thing - they were ok with plenty of adjustment, did a compression check - everything was ok, [...]

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Today we said good bye to Sharon & Darren who had been travelling with us since Coober Pedy, we also said good bye to our new friends Rick & Sue who we meet at Uluru. After saying goodbye to everyone it was time to see a few more of the sights.
First on our list was [...]

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Alice Springs – Day 20
Today we focused mostly on the kombi. I tested everything I could think of and changed almost all of the electric’s (plugs, points, coil, etc) but it didn’t make any difference. There was no way we could drive onto to Tennent Creek the way Shirl was so in the end [...]

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Alice Springs – Day 21
This morning we were woken by NRMA with the news that they had found us a car and had booked it for us for five days – a brand new Ford Falcon, it had to picked up at 10am.
We also had to move sites today as well, lucky for us [...]

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Alice Springs – Day 22

Alice Springs is a great place to break down for there is so much to do and see. One of the reasons it was so hard to find accommodation or rent a car here is because of the Camel Cup which as been running annually now for 31 years. Seeing that [...]

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Seeing that today was Sunday we thought we would Attend the morning service at Alice Springs Baptist Church. Following the service we decided to head out to see a bit more of the West McDonald Ranges and we drove out to Glen Helen Gorge which we liked very much, it had a permanent water hole, [...]

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We woke early today to put Shirl in at the VW dealer and seeing that we were up we decided to visit the Desert Park in Alice Springs. This turned out to be really quite enjoyable and it took a lot longer to see everything than we expected, it was well worth the visit. I [...]

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We did get up early today, but by the time we packed up, took back the hire car, got petrol and went to the bank it was almost 11am. Everything was going fine until we were about 60km outside of Marla SA or about 400km south of Alice Springs when the points failed. 
I put new points [...]

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The Mechanic in Marla told us that the cause of the breakdown were the points, unfortunatly he didn’t have any, but luckly I still had the old set I took out in Alice.  After a few phones calls we discovered that someone in Coober Pedy had some points in Stock so we decided to put [...]

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Well the trip home was quite an adventure. The Opal fuel has certainly caused a few issues with the Carby’s and they played most of the way home. At one point I could only get full throttle and shirl was screaming along at 110km.
As mentioned before we had some trouble about 60km outside of Marla [...]

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From Coober Pedy Shirl really travelled well, despite buying new points I didn’t put them in because she was running so well. By 2pm we had reached Peterborough and decided to stay there the night.
In the morning (Friday 18th July - Day 28) Shirl started and ran well for the first hour and then started [...]

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We left Broken Hill as early as we could not really sure how far we would get, but Shirl travelled well and would could sit on 80km, despite a strong head wind.
Carolyn  & I took turns driving and sitting in the back watching movies with the kids or sleeping, the only stops we made were [...]

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