Well life is just so much fun out exploring if you love fallen trees river crossings mud slush fog rain hail snow storms blizards and seeing the temp guage reading 1 degree.
Unfortunately the heavy bad weather has brought its share of tradgedy to the Vic countryside but its also a good time to
test out your systems before heading off on longer trips.
We checked out some things as follows.
The bad weather hit Vic tuesday and several groups got straight into it that night but
we didn't get away till Saturday and much of the deep snow had gone but there was more than sufficent out there to make for an exciting weekend and to brush up on ones navigation skills, and give a new set of St-Maxx tyres a go in the snow.
One of the first obstacles we came to was a downed tree which had no way around and conditions were bad but the
forrest was adjacent to
farm land and beyond the tree we spotted a
gate in the fence.
Tree Down
So instantly we waypointed
the spot and backtracked a Km or 2 with the intention of bypassing the tree by driving the farmland.
(Its good to
check that you can do this easily - our GPS has a Man overboard button, just press and its done).
Usually there are gates between paddocks but the MOB feature sets a course automatically to the waypoint and we drove the paddocks one by one carefully, using cattle paths as
well and sure enough bypassed the problem.
It was a good example of how you sometimes need to navigate cross country even in Victoria.
Across Paddocks
We had a 2nd GPS ,a new upmarket Garmin Nuvi GPS under
test, while it excelled in normal street work it was just to hard to use for this type of mission.
Not long after we encountered a normally dry creek bed which was now a river and needed care and tested the water proofness of some new mods.
Thought this was dry
As we proceeded up a mountain rd the weather got worse and surprizingly we began to see lots of Lyrebirds playing in the wind driven rain.
We had to go to 4wd to just say on the slippery clay road and it was getting late and dark with fog and low visibility.
By 1000 meters altitude the weather began to change, things got quieter, the rain being replaced by sleet and the road
began to dry out with a layer of about 2 inches of frozen snow and tyres really bit
well.
At the roads highest point 1250m there was just enough snow for the kids to have a decent snow fight and build a Snowman on the cars bonnet before we were off.
I'll get him this time
We headed down into
Buxton, and saw the only car on the whole dirt road trip which I had to swerve away from as it rounded a bend and we lost our Snowman.
The above gave the car, its systems and the driver(s) a good
check out and its
well worth doing while help is only a phone call away.
Only thing I need to solve is our near new wiper blades were very noisy with light rain , any ideas ?