We worked out that we would take four days to get back to Gayndah and considering that we had some preparaion to do for the Australia Day Function in Gayndah we thought that leaving Adelaide on Wednesday 14th of January would work well. So that is what we did. Our aim on the first day was to get to Broken Hill and stay at the Broken Hill Tourist Park for the evening.
We arrived there at around 4pm and booked in. But first we should talk about the days activity. Lisa leaves for work at 6.02am so we arose at 5.45 so that we could say goodbye to her on the day. We then had breakfast and packed all the things that still needed packing. We had packed all that wasn’t needed on Tuesday afternoon and loaded up the car at that time. The biggest issue re packing was the fridge which we left plugged in to the 240v until Wednesday morning. It didn’t take long to load it into the car and plug it into the 12v ready for the trip.
We were ready to leave a little prior to 7am so Jason woke Kai and Grace up to bid us farewell. With all of that done, we were on the way. Even at 7 o’clock in the morning there was lots of traffic around but getting onto the freeway that took us north from Adelaide for about 20ks turned out to be relatively easy.
Our first charging stop was Peterborough, close to 300ks north east of Adelaide. We scheduled a stop at Jamestown where we stopped briefly but Jamestown was included because it had a RAA charging station which we didn’t need but was good to be there just in case. I drove till Jamestown and Lorraine drove to Peterborough.
We arrived in Peterborough at around 10.30 and found the RAA chargers. We spent the charging time looking around Peterborough and also spent some time in the local supermarket to buy some bread for lunch and some food for our tea in Broken Hill. We were disappointed there was no bakery in town.
After charging to 100% SOC, we were on the way. There is very little anywhere on the way to Broken Hill except desert and a couple of one horse towns. We stopped at a rest area somewhere along the way and had some lunch. One of the advantages of having the fridge in the car is when needed, say for lunch, we can take it out and have what ever we want suitably cold. Before leaving Peterborough, we phoned the Broken Hill Tourist Park to book a cabin for the night.
We checked in and were allocated a cabin that had been build from a shipping container. It was probably smaller that we would like but it only cost $105 for the night so we didn’t complain. Our relatively early arrival in Broken Hill allowed for a reasonably early excursion to the local charger. It was a little concerning because my first attempt at connection was a failure.
We use an app called PlugShare to find the chargers on the map and the app usually indicates how reliable the chargers are, whether they are working and whether they are being used. PlugShare indicated that the Broken Hill chargers had a PlugScore of 10.0 which means they are reliable and also that neither of the chargers were occupied. When I plugged in however, the charger would not communicate with car as it should. All of the chargers had a phone contact in case of problems and the guy on the other end said there was no indication of problem with the Broken Hill chargers. However he said that he would re-boot the unit and within five minutes, all was working.