Karratha Stop-over

We planned to leave Cossack yesterday, and we did just that. The rest of the plan was to stop-over at Karratha for just one night. Apart from me getting a lump hacked out of me by a visiting surgeon (last night), we also needed to buy our food, purchase a new Telstra 4G data modem and casual plan, fuel up the vehicle, fit a new cranking battery to the vehicle and then leave around midday.

That was the plan. What actually happened was, naturally, quite different. For starters, the freight company hadn't delivered the cranking battery. This was their second attempt, having smashed the first attempt, requiring my supplier to send another. They then lost the replacement and had unsuccessfully attempted to locate it, before I finally got the shits and rang the various depots myself, locating the damn thing within a few minutes. Anyway, even after finding the battery, they still couldn't get their act together and actually deliver it, so I picked it up myself (not without more drama as someone had moved it and they had to yet another seek-and-destroy mission to find it.)

Then I discovered that my auxiliary battery was in equally bad condition. The original one is quite unique and I wasn't hopeful of getting a replacement in Karratha. Couldn't have been any more correct! To cut a very long story short, some modified wiring saw a close match fitted, along with the new cranking battery and I could finally tick one box on the "things to do list".

Next came the Telstra modem. Oh Boy! Have any of you spent several hours in a Telstra Shop for what is, on the face of it, a really straight-forward purchase? Today's drama was that their "Contracts Computer" was down. All of the forms had to be printed off and completed manually. Should have done that in the first place and it would have saved an hour. Anyway, two and a half hours later I walked out with the new modem. No, I didn't walk out with a cord for the external antenna for said modem. Telstra didn't have one. I had to get that from a different shop. I actually tried to get all of this done a week earlier but there was a different glitch in a different system and nothing could be done. Sheesh.

One by one all of the boxes had been ticked, but not before it was too late to consider "rolling on down the road." So, we'll get away tomorrow morning - a day later than planned, but who cares? It's not like we're in a hurry.