Long Road, Heavy Load

In a previous role I managed a government community information road-show. Its centre-piece was a large caravan, that weighed over three-tonne (3000 kg) and was the length of two family sedans. I used to tow this caravan to community events, rural field days and country shows, as well as just turning up in the main street of small country communities. It was an interesting life-style. I didn't sleep in the caravan, as some visitors seemed to think, because it was set up with seven desktop computers, an overhead projector and screen, and a small server to connect it to the internet through the phone system. It had been a classroom in a caravan, one of eight, for the Victorian Automobile Chamber of Commerce when they introduced computerised systems to all their clients and they needed to train them (that would have been an interesting project to work on!). Because the caravan was so large, we did not try and drive long distances with it from day to day. However, we would take it to a region and move it between towns in that region from one day to the next. I kept a lot of stats for the project and I worked out that on any day I was usually an average of about 245km from the office! We tried to keep travel between towns to 70km or under per day, but reading an old log I realise that sometimes we had to put a few miles behind us, like the time I had to move the van from Coleraine to Yarrawonga (close to 600km). I tried to visit every rural community where at least 300 people, or more, resided. But I missed a couple, like the time I was on the road from Donald to Warracknabeal and one of the four wheels on the van came flying off! (There was a major failure of the four studs holding the wheel onto the hub. It had probably occurred over time but on this particular day there was a lot of pressure on that wheel due to very strong winds.) In the end there were only a couple of communities I don't recall giving a presentation at, including Harrietville and Netherby (sorry guys!). They were on my list but we ran out of time. I'll talk more about the road-show and try to find some photos to upload, in later posts.