Where’s my awning poles gone?!
Today has been one of those days. We’d planned to leave Hammond Road North Campground and head into Torquay to stock up and look around, before going through Geelong and out to another campsite outside of the concrete jungle.
All was going to plan (minus a wet bed from one of our kids, which meant an extra visit to the laundromat), and we even found a double car park in the Woolworths car park that we could fit into comfortably, and Sarah headed off to do the food shopping with Cooper.
I grabbed Oliver, and was walking around our camper locking it up, when I noticed that the screw in hatch on the fridge side of the camper wasn’t there, and an awning pole was poking out a bit.
I lost our water caps back in South Australia and know how hard it is to find things, but my mind turned to whether anything might have fallen out. I pulled the poles out and counted, and to my dismay 3 of them were missing, out of the 10, and we’d just driven 40 minutes.
Debating whether to head out straight away and look for them or not, we did the shopping, washing, filled up with water, swapped a gas bottle and emptied the rubbish, and headed out 40 minutes in the wrong direction to look for our poles.
Without them we’d be unable to set the awning up, which is kind of important when its raining and you have an outdoor kitchen!
Two would be easy enough to replace, with one being a custom job for our awning, and I knew if we could find them it would be a problem solved. The other issue though, was the missing hatch cover, which I reckon would be fun to replace.
We drove all the way back to camp, with our eyes peeled and saw absolutely nothing, despite paying careful attention to any right hand corners where the poles could have come out.
Feeling disappointed, we turned back towards Torquay, to have one more look with the side of the road closer where it would have come off. On a corner in the middle, Sarah spied the screw in cover, of all things. We looked around, and checked a number of other corners but couldn’t find the poles, so gave up.
Best guess, someone collected them whilst we were in Torquay, or their covered by thick grass on the side of the road. Either way, we rolled into Geelong to get fuel at around 3:30, and didn’t get to camp until about 5PM, where it started to rain not long after.
Good times!
