Last night we were forced to make imaginative use of a campsite barbecue to cook spaghetti bolognese because our LPG camping stove has developed a rather worrying gas leak. Today’s mission, therefore is to get it fixed. As has been customary for the last two and a half months of our lives, it’s currently weeing down* with rain anyways so seems like a fair use of our time.

Almost every day, I check the oil and coolant levels in Don, our car, and today is no different except–shock, horror–the coolant is down from being at the maximum marker yesterday to just a smidgeon above the minimum today. This is not good news. Don has been, no wait, is a super-reliable machine. He has been partial to a coolant top-up now and again, but that’s quite understandable having transported us through fifty-plus degree heat out west and high forties across the Nullarbor. Since we got back from New Zealand, the sky has been mostly overcast and/or raining and now he wants the green stuff daily. Surely the slower, more congested traffic flow out east isn’t taking its toll on our vehicular linchpin?

We located a friendly camping store who quickly deduced our stove gas leak was due to a missing O-ring on our pipe. A dollar-fifty fix. “Let’s hope my other leak costs the same to fix!”, I exclaimed. At which point an off-duty car mechanic made himself known and offered some advice about the problem.

“It’s almost certainly the head gasket”, he ruled, “goes on Falcons all the time.”

Anyone with even less mechanical knowledge than myself should re-read that sentence as (sung in sinister horror movie backing music style) “Da-da-da, da-darrrrr!”. In fairness to the bloke, he hadn’t actually looked inside the engine bay before giving his diagnosis; he was just trying to be helpful. At a pinch, it might just be the water pump (cheap) or the radiator (not cheap), but most probably the head gasket which would be a three day, AUD$800 job — and, being Easter, most garages here don’t even open for another three days.

Suitably shaken-up, we set about to achieve the almost impossible: to find a mechanic who could diagnose the fault and perhaps start work today. Ballina is a nice enough town, but spending six days here in a wet campsite without a kitchen or TV lounge (read: dry room) would drive us wild and almost certainly mean we’d have to sacrifice a stay elsewhere up the coast. Persistence pays: after driving the damp backstreets for a wee while, we happened upon a workshop with the its roll doors up. Without having to twist anything, this great man sprang into action and, after a multi-angled squizz around the engine cooling system, put a hand-pump pressure tester onto the expansion tank… and its cap.

With the certainty of a doctor removing her stethoscope from her ears, the mechanic held-up the tank’s cap and decreed that it was dead and a a replacement could be procured from a nearby auto spares shop. Total cost AUD$23: $13 for the replacement cap, $10 for a special-offer six pack of beer for the mechanic who has quite possibly saved our bacon.

We now have all fingers, toes and anything else we can get our hands on crossed in the hope that the replacement cap does the trick. I’ll be keeping an even closer eye on the fluid levels before and after our next big drives — will keep you posted.

* I’d just like like to record in this footnote that once again we’ve been told that the current weather–in this case hard rain–is “exceptional” for this time of year. Regardless of our location, we’ve received “exceptional” weather, be it too hot/cold/wet, for over four and a half months now.