Thursday 13th May - Fremantle

We’re finally reunited with our Land Rover, although we still need to get it inspected by the vehicle licensing people as, by the time we had been up to the cleaning place to collect our vehicle, it was mid-morning and there were big queues at both the test centres (with no guarantee we would get through before closure).  We’ll go nice and early tomorrow, with a 6am start to try to be first in line.  Cleaning only cost us $60 and the guy said that there wasn’t much mud to wash off, so our hours of effort before we shipped weren’t totally in vain.

We thought we had better give the Land Rover a bit of a run to check it over and to give the batteries a chance to recharge, so headed off to north Perth to a recommended communications place to buy a UHF radio to replace our UK CB.  We’ll fit it tomorrow after the inspection, and sort ourselves out and the back of the Land Rover to be ready to head south down to Margaret River on Saturday/Sunday.  We might have to give the seat covers a bit of a soak in order to get out the musty smell, but luckily the weather forecast is more promising tomorrow after today’s rain (and I thought it was always meant to be sunny in Australia).

A couple of small issues with the Land Rover - one of the rear lights had stopped working (but a quick clean of the contacts soon restored illumination) and there’s a bit of a juddering as we slow to a stop.  We gave Ben a quick call and he reckons it’s the handbrake binding slightly, which was adjusted before we left, so I’ll check it out tomorrow as it’s now dark outside.