Steampunk Nomads

Our new home by the seaside!!

We arrived at the dealers in Mt Maunganui nice and early and was shown around. Our heads were spinning very quickly as there was so much to try and take on board!  We got dropped off at a very pleasant nearby motorcamp for a couple of days while the ute was fitted with the hitch and electrics needed to tow the fifth wheeler.

The view was great – right on the waterfront but a bit disturbing when we realised how busy the boardwalk right in front of us was. All good though – our windows are so darkly tinted that no one could see in. We quickly got used to how the TV and finding satellites for reception worked and tried out the microwave, since we were on power. The next day we decided to try out the solar and that seemed all good too.

The big test came when we had to empty our grey and black tanks (or dumping as is known in RV land). Luckily, that actually was much easier than we had thought it would be. Finally, we are on our way to Auckland to visit the Covi Motorhome Show in Auckland. Chris is driving at the moment cos she’s the only one with the C2 license and … she’s more experienced and confident! We plug the trip to Auckland into the GPS and off we went. It actually towed very nicely Chris said – all good. We hadn’t realised the route the GPS had chosen for us was through the Karangahake Gorge. Talk about baptism by fire! No scrapes on any of the narrow bridges or on the narrow Gorge road even after meeting logging truck after logging truck!

We settled into our posy at Alexandra Park right next to a tree – another lesson learn’t!!  The satellite dish can’t seem to find any satellites when it’s looking for them through trees – apparently.  So, no TV!!  And, it was then we discovered that our fridge didn’t work on gas!  We also discovered that the DVD unit wasn’t set up to play NZ region DVD’s, so we couldn’t watch a movie either!!   We returned to Tauranga from Auckland to get the dealer to look at fixing our fridge, and to get some help with the DVD player – with no luck wotsoever.

We have to say the shine was definitely wearing very quickly off our flash new vehicle by now and the experience was a hard one to get to grips with. Going from having never even stayed in a motorhome or caravan to living fulltime in one foul swoop is a steep learning curve – that’s for sure – and with the teething problems we were having it was feeling like a very daunting exercise.