This weekend was a long weekend here in South Australia, so a three day break was a good excuse to do a small shakedown trip in the MAN.  If you want to read the riveting statistics on how many litres/100Km it used and so on, see the end of this post.

Some friends have an old cottage up at Blinman up in the Flinders Ranges, so that was the destination. The cottage has seen better days, but is extremely rustic and made a great base for the weekend. Great views and nice and quiet.

The trip up took about 6.5 hours to do 500Kms. I went the 'scenic way' via the Adelaide Hills and then the Barossa Valley and then through Clare (all wine-growing districts).  Fabulous weather at around 28 to 30 degrees. Here's my lunch stop:

This is the little cottage. There is no power, no running water, no lighting and the toilet is an outside long drop, pretty similar to the way it would have been 100 years ago.

This is the view from the MAN in the morning:

As the house didn't have a shower, we set up the outside shower on the side of the truck as an open air operation. This was the first time the shower has been used and it worked very well. Nice hot water in about half an hour using gas. The truck's water tank was only half filled and that was plenty for 10 showers.

We took it out on some rocky steep tracks, climbing to the top of a hill to check out a communications tower just outside Blinman, and did a few kilometres on some corrugated dirt roads.  It is actually really comfortable on corrugations and wash-aways. I foolishly forgot to lock the kitchen cupboards before we did this, and one of the doors opened and deposited its contents onto the floor (and broke the drawer) - what a twit.  Something to learn for a beginner. Always check things are locked/shut before you set off.

On the way up we followed a rutted track used by the Telecom crews, but on the way down we just pointed it straight down the hill in low range 4x4. Just using engine compression in low 1st, it went down at less than walking pace. Very controlled.

There was a lot of 'scratching'/'brushing' noise going on through the narrow parts of the track, where the width of the MAN brushed past bushes that normal 4x4s would not touch. No damage or anything, but you know very well that it is wider than the usual vehicles that use these tracks.

Other things I discovered were:

- I need an LED clock somewhere, so you can tell what the time is in the middle of the night.

- One 'mat' is not enough to shower on. Another dry one would be good to dry off on.

- To clean the windscreen, I'm going to need a squeegee on a very long stick, or carry a step ladder.

- The cabin needs some more power sockets (for the GPS, the CrashCam, and so on)

- I need some smaller water bottles, as my Kathmandu ones are too fat to fit into the cup holders.

- The backing plates on the front disks have an annoying rattle on corrugations at about 90Km/h, so will have to ring MAN to see what can be done about that

Overall a very worthwhile & enjoyable few days!

Trip Stats

On the way up there, I had a pretty stiff head wind, and drove at 100Km/h whenever I could. Fuel usage was not so great at 30.6L/100km. 

Coming back I dropped my top speed back to 95Km/h and had a bit of a tail wind which returned a much better figure of 23.7L/100km.

Blinman's altitude is 620m compared to Balhannah at 400m, so it was slightly uphill on the way there, but I don't really think 220m of climbing over 500Km would have any effect on the fuel consumption, so all I can put the large difference down to is the headwinds and the slightly higher speed on the way up there.

Total distance travelled for the weekend was 1066 Kms and total driving time was around 13.5 hours, so an average speed of 79Km/h. Total fuel used was 296 litres. Fuel tank capacity is 300L, so I can reasonably expect to get about 1100Kms from a tank which is quite a good range on the standard tank. Don't think I need to get a long range tank fitted.

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