Despite our hopes, it rained heavily all last night. Fortunately the rain stopped early morning but the sky remained grey and overcast all day with occasional showers. We decided to stay in Maryborough another day rather than travel through bad weather and hope that the weather would improve tomorrow.
So this morning we just fiddled about in the van. Some of last night’s rain had somehow got inside so I spent a little bit of time carrying out some emergency sealing repairs where it appeared that the caulking around one of the windows had shrunk slightly and may have been the cause of the leak.
Minor caravan repairs
We had our morning coffee under the awning although the wind blew up quite strongly so we decided to put the awning up and escape inside, out of the weather completely.
As fifth wheel style caravans aren’t that numerous on the road, I am always interested to see them on the road and to talk to other 5th wheeler owners. A quite unusual 5th wheeler parked in the site next door so I went out to have a chat to the owner. It turned out that he had made his own 5th wheeler by converting a conventional Roadstar caravan, because he preferred the towing characteristics of the 5th wheeler over that of a caravan. Basically he chopped the front “boot” off the caravan and welded in a new sub-frame for the new hitch. He then modified a fibreglass aerodynamic nose cone for large trucks for the new front for his caravan, and while he was at it added additional side storage compartments. He then custom made a special tray with hitch for his ute – a BT50 of course. The end result is a great combination of the best features of both a caravan and a 5th wheeler. His design means that the bed is in its original position and he can walk around it and he can still lift it up for storage – something we can’t do! Sure there are some compromises but there always are no matter what sort of RV you have. This project obviously took a lot of thought and effort and it’s great to see such ozzie ingenuity.
Interesting home made fifth wheeler caravan
After lunch in the van we put on waterproof/windproof jackets and went for a good long walk. We stopped for coffee at the Station Square shopping centre before walking back past Aldi where we stopped for a few more supplies.
Today has been a lazy sort of day and we haven’t done any touristy type things. We did however see this interesting monument to the pioneers of Maryborough.
Monument to the early pioneers of Maryborough
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