I woke unfortunately early, with dozens of thoughts and scenarios going through my head. It’s not necessarily stress about repairing Deli-chan, it’s more caution due to a lack of time and money.

We’d told the wrecker here that we wanted him to pick up the car first thing in the morning, but I had to call him at 7AM to confirm it. Damn lucky that I called him back, because the driver was warming up the truck to come and get us. I had a mad idea that we could probably buy a ticket for the bus if we just turned up, which I thought was unlikely, but I checked with the reception of the holiday park we are staying at. He seemed surprisingly confident that we should be able to do it, so I raced back to the car and woke Risa up. It was now about 7:20AM.

We rushed like lunatics to try and pack and get ready for the bus. I thought we should have plenty of time, as it was about a 15-minute walk to the bus stop and the bus didn’t leave until 8:30.

… except, I remembered the departure time wrong… The receptionist thought it was 8AM, but I was convinced it was 8:30. It wasn’t until 7:45AM that Risa also said it left at 8AM…

So, we grabbed what we could carry (I had my camera bag with all the lenses and my laptop, a bag with clothes and food, and a large bottle of water. Risa had similar) and ran as fast as we could, knowing full well that it was futile. The grass was still wet with the morning dew – which any Aussie will know it’s not an easy thing to run in thongs when your feet are wet… We arrived at the bus stop at 8:10AM, which had I been correct with the departure times, would have been perfect. But, since I was wrong, we were at least 10 minutes late…

We sat there for a while, feeling sore/tired/exhausted/disappointed. It’s been a while since I’ve had to run – I think it’s my most despised form of transportation. Also, it turns out that you can actually buy a ticket from the driver if they have available seats. The only catch is you need to have exact change and be there 30 minutes prior to boarding… so we were forty minutes late. Futile.

We slowly returned to the caravan park. It was really starting to heat up, but that was probably due to my jeans and jumper being inappropriate for walking in during non winter months.

Planned to spend the day trying to finalise what I was going to do with the Delica in Perth. We had a few options, none were too appealing. I gave up on the idea of being able to do it myself – I recognise it’s probably just a little over my head with the tools and work area I have access to. I was going to start searching other forums for recommended mechanics… only neither Risa or I could connect to the Optus network. We sat around, read our books and waited for their network to come back up. I searched and couldn’t see any service outages in our area (we have a Telstra 4G modem) so called customer support. In the weirdest co-incidence, after I spoke to a lady in accounts about our phones, but before speaking to the technicians, we were able to connect to the network again… Most inconvenient timing…

I also tried reaching out to some members of the Delica Club, hoping that someone might have the time/place to help me do it, but it was a long shot.

Managed to find a few other workshops that were recommended by other forums by Mitsubishi Pajero owners (same engine) so called around and found one that didn’t seem like they were out to rip us off from the onset (Robsons 4×4), though time will tell…

And that was our day. Gone before we realised. Early start tomorrow, tow truck is arriving at 7AM… looking forward to laughing at Risa struggling with the ‘early’ morning!