MONDAY 15 JUNE     TOWNSVILLE

John left before 8am to take Truck to the brake service place.

I washed the bedding.

Truck and driver were back again quite soon. The problem was not the “servo” (don’t ask me), as the guy had assumed, on Friday. The issue appeared to be the vacuum pump. Some sort of test measured at 7, when it should have been over 20. Naturally, that was a part that our incompetent mechanic had actually replaced – and charged a heap for – just before we left home.

When John had gone back to him, from Bendigo, the man must have realized what the problem would be – either he couldn’t be bothered dealing with it, or he didn’t want to admit that he’d stuffed up, somehow.

John was furious, all over again. Apparently, there was a chance that the camshaft might need replacing, but if that was the case, then Mr Incompetent should have been able to figure that out, too. I didn’t know what a camshaft does, but didn’t think it had anything to do with brakes?

So, we still had a brake problem…..

When we were in Charters Towers, nephew M told John about a place in Townsville called All Old Landrovers, where the guy was a devotee of the brand. John phoned him; he was very busy but said John could take Truck there tomorrow at 9.30am, he would supervise and John could do at least some of the work. He said he had the required parts there. Hmmm…..this could be interesting…..

We walked to Castletown shops. Browsed. At a bookshop, John bought Access for Dummies – he’s keen to learn Access. I bought five paperbacks in one of those 5 for $……..deals. We consumed Gloria Jean coffees – a win for me since John considers buying coffee a waste of money. He bought a new computer game – no comment! We went to check out mobile phones  because ours had stopped holding any charge for long.

Then we went back to the van, to ponder phone options. After lunch, John went back to the shop and got a new phone. It didn’t cost, he said, because we were still in plan, but he upped the plan to $30 a month, so it did actually cost us! He also bought a pre-paid phone card for the old phone – that means I will now have my own phone. In going through the manual for the new phone, realized we could have just bought a new battery for the old phone. How dumb are we? Oh well, the new phone was a much improved model – it “talked” the numbers input and had bigger keys.

A few days ago, John had phoned our doctor to write a new Celebrex script for him. He had phoned our house sitters at the same time, to ask if they could collect the script from doctor, and send it in the next mail bag. He also asked them to find and send his Access book, from home. Today, said Access book turned up in his stash of stuff in the van, so he had to call them back and apologize if they were still looking for it! They were very obliging sitters…..

It was a day of lots of phone calls. One also went to our computer person, about upgrading Windows, and that was duly arranged. I didn’t know why that could not have been arranged before we left home…