New South Wales - Coming Full Circle

Crossing the border back into New South Wales we decided to head straight to Sydney with one little stop on the way. Francis felt that Byron Bay was a must see and everyone had recommended it so off we went. It wasn’t easy though because the truck decided that morning that it hated us and refused to shift from first to second the whole traffic jammed way there. By the time we arrived we were very stressed. We ate a quick breakfast at the farmers market, checked out some surf beaches and decided not to press our luck with the truck and get to Sydney as fast as possible.

Back on the highway the truck fell back in love with us and pretended like nothing ever happened. We swear this truck is alive and moody. We drove the rest of the day and into the night to get to Sydney. We were so tired but the realization still hit us that our fun adventure of driving around Australia had come full circle. We were back in familiar Sydney and soon we’d be heading off someplace new.

With the truck back to normal we put it up for sale at $4900 and went about posting it online and at all the backpacker places. We only got two calls and it started acting funny. Shifting when it was warm but not when its cold. We took it to a mechanic. He estimated a second hand transmission would run us $1700 and a new $3500. Just to open it up would be $700 to diagnose it and possibly we’d get lucky and it would be a small job of just an addition couple hundred bucks. With no calls coming in and being short on time we had to make a tough decision.

We have decided to take a loss and sell the truck at $1500 stating the shift issue on our ad. Now we are fielding calls and hoping to get the full asking price before Monday. We have booked our tickets to New Zealand for Wednesday and if all else fails we have the sad reality of taking it to a wrecker which is not what we want. We have invested money and time in this truck, it still runs great and we don’t want to see it scrapped for metal. This dilemma has meant that we will have to skip Tasmania which is sad but it is what it is. We will still visit New Zealand (south island) and Melbourne.

On the bright side we consider the fact that we are lucky that the truck held on until we reached our goal. Investing in this truck allowed us the freedom to do everything we wanted and gave us the security of always having a place to sleep at night. Yes, we are taking a loss but we gained so much more in other ways.

Now we play the waiting game… stay tuned!