We've done another small shakedown trip, and took the MAN to a beach a few hundred Kms away from home for a 4 day long weekend.

This trip was to the western side of Yorke Peninsula, in South Australia. Discovered a couple of issues that need attention, such as my special air-dryer "muffler" not being robust enough and blowing a pipe (the muffler makes the nasty hissing noise from the air dryer a lot quieter), but generally no problems at all. The new internal shower worked well, as did the composting toilet which was completely smell free.

We had a great spot, and over 4 days we probably only saw about 6 or 8 other people on the beach.  The dog loved it, that's for sure!  Weather was 30 degrees most days, and the water was surprisingly warm for the start of summer.

I tried out my new Phantom Vision2+ drone, and I've got a small YouTube video with some shots down below in this post. Unfortunately I crashed it into the only fence around for about 10 miles and smashed a propeller, but not too serious.  You're supposed to be able to see the vision from the drone on your phone (attached to the hand controller) but in bright sunlight it is quite difficult.  I might try a bigger screen, like an iPad next time.

Other than that, it was just four days of doing nothing. I read half a book, and that's about it!

This is how the beach looked, in both directions, from where we camped.

One evening we got hit by a brief thunderstorm, with big winds, so we had to pack up our camping table and chairs and set them up inside the truck. One of the next big jobs on the to-do list is to build the internal seats and table top.

We made a list of things that we need to take/modify for the next outing:

• Fire poker
• Clothesline/pegs
• Handbroom/pan
• Scissors
• Fly swat
• Paper maps

Every trip refines things a bit more!

Video with some test shots from the Drone

The real video (as opposed to the one uploaded to YouTube) is much higher quality (1080p) but that turned into a 1Gb file which was waaaay too big to upload, so I had to reduce the quality for YouTube.  However, you get the idea of where we were and the sort of shots you can get with a drone.  And it was a lot of fun flying it!

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