January 17-21
After spending the last almost 3 months around Brisbane helping the girls (especially Laura) we took a short break with Olivia and her three (Taj, Lachlan and Abigail) to the caravan park at Leslie Dam near Warwick. Olivia had wanted to give the kids a bit of a camping holiday before school so we suggested they come with us somewhere. This looked like a good spot with plenty of room for the boys to ride their bikes, a swimming pool and lots of space.
It was also our first tryout of the Landcruiser towing the van out of town including climbing over Cunningham s Gap on the Cunningham Highway. Performance up here was very similar to the Jackaroo with the petrol engine of the ‘cruiser needing to maintain higher revs to stay in he torque band, but also having 50% more horsepower. So on the lower sections maintaining third gear at around 65-70kmh was quite easy and on the top (steep) section we found that holding second gear at 40-45 kmh was acceptable. Fuel consumption seemed what we expected at about 25% more than the diesel Jackaroo.
We enjoyed fairly hot weather for most of our 4 night stay athough drier heat than Brisbane, and only had a couple of heavy showers on our last night (Friday), We also managed two nights of toasting marshmallows over a fire
We had picked up a new Satellite TV Kit from Brisbane on behalf of Full Range Camping and did some video and stills of unpacking and assembling the kit for a product review.
And so back to Brisbane and Laura’s to finish off a couple of projects for her and ourselves….