VC Mads

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VC Mads VC Mads, we are a couple traveling around in our Van Cruiser caravan. No particular route.

We prefer to take the road less traveled, the B and C roads, exploring and taking bad photos.

So whilst we are home we have taken the opportunity to do some maintenance on often overlooked parts, the stabilizing le...
04/09/2026

So whilst we are home we have taken the opportunity to do some maintenance on often overlooked parts, the stabilizing legs.
They are an easy but dirty thing to clean. So much is made of not using impact drills on them but if they are looked after there is no issue.
Dirt, dust and small rocks all get caught in the grease, which in turn causes issues with winding them down, we noticed a couple of ours were getting stiffer, even though we use a drill to raise and lower, so it was time to clean them.
You only need a basic set of tools.
16mm socket and spanner for the main bolt attaching them to the van.
A flat head screw driver to prise things off.
A hammer to nudge out the locator pins.
A small punch or as I have used, an allen key to punch out the locator pins.
Needle nose pliers to help replace the locator pins.
Then it is just degreaser, rags and replacement grease.
There is a small encased bearing that sits atop the main screw and presses against the outer housing below the drive cogs, ours were rough to turn as the grease and dirt was clogging it up.
Each leg took just over 30min to do, except when I put them back together wrong 😒 and had to pull them apart again. The majority of that time was trying to clean off the old grease, if you have access to an industrial pressure degreasing station it would be a lot faster.
A simple easy job that will prevent no doubt headaches when they go wrong.

We have made it back to the big smoke and home base, finishing OUR lap, that has been over 2 years in the making, it's b...
25/08/2026

We have made it back to the big smoke and home base, finishing OUR lap, that has been over 2 years in the making, it's been a hectic couple of weeks as we marched our way from WA back to QLD and our home base.
It wasn't planned but after a planning meeting where we listed everything we needed to achieve whilst home it became apparent time was not on our side, add in the last minute decision to head to Vic in Nov for the Van Cruiser catch-up, we had a lot of work to do, especially if we were going to make our 2027 departure date.
In the works is some much needed pampering of the van, a complete strip out and repack minus a bit of stuff we have been carrying, a deep deep deep clean, we will be pulling things apart and reassembling and improving changes we made on the road. Details to come.
We have some upgrades for the tow pig (car)planned as well, hoping to drop some weight and make it more user friendly.
Then there is our home base, we were only here for a short while before hitting the road, it's time to make it a little more ours before we leave again 😏 to fill in the gaps.
When we left we put a lot of "stuff" in storage, it's time for this to go so we don't have those cost eating into our monthly costings.

20/08/2026

Recently we posted pics of our dirty dirty car and van, it's not we don't love both of them, we just end up on dirt more often then not, case in point, today just outside of Birdsville they have a truck wash for the cattle trucks, we decided we would give everything a quick wash down and get some of the dirt and dust off, we have been on bitumen for a bit now so we thought it was safe. Well, just east of Birdsville the road goes back to dirt 🤣, now we have clean fresh dirt all over the car and van.

The adventure of big red 😁
20/08/2026

The adventure of big red 😁

We have been visiting the B towns, Boulia, Bedourie, Birdsville and Betoota along the DDR, EDR and BDR 😁, that's Diamant...
20/08/2026

We have been visiting the B towns, Boulia, Bedourie, Birdsville and Betoota along the DDR, EDR and BDR 😁, that's Diamantina Development road, Eyre DR and the Birdsville DR.
The landscape is so green 💚 at present after all the rain, so lucky to be here at this time and able to see it. There has been an abundance of predator birds along the road as well, everything from Eagles to multiple types of Kites and Falcons. Whilst we saw several eagles along the road but we couldn't get a photo, however there is a wildlife rescue place in Boulia who sadly have one of these majestic birds in their care with what looks like a broken wing, so we finally got a picture, to get so close was awesome. We stayed at the free camp behind the racecourse in Boulia, where we saw our first wild camel 🐪 on our travels, in Bedourie we spent a night in the council park and in Birdsville we free camped just outside of town, all these towns have amazing facilities for travelers.
Between Boulia and Bedourie there is an elevated lookout, not sure why but it's suggested you don't take a caravan up to it, so we went up anyway, plenty of turn around room, just a steep section and it's single lane so you need to watch for traffic coming the other way.
In Bedourie there is a hot spa you can use for a single fee for your stay, visit as often as you like, temp was 40 deg 🥵 but it's located in the aquatic centre so you can cool off in the main pool which was being heated to 28 deg, the camp is also close to the pub so after a soak we headed there for a b**r.
Next stop Birdsville, we had thought we would spend a couple of nights here but we arrived early enough that we decided to head out and tackle BIG RED, we were expecting it to be 😲 but from the east side it's a bit 😴, we were told by other travelers it had been cut up, it wasn't that bad, we dropped tyre pressures, selected high range 2nd and walked it up over the ruts.
The west side however was a whole lot of fun, it took multiple attempts before we made it back up (pics to come), traction control is a pain 😒, just when you need power 👎, ended up needing low range 4 and some well placed tracks. With that excitement over we headed to the pub for dinner.
We had hoped to grab lunch at Betoota but they don't do lunch, so we had a squizz around before heading on.
We have pulled up in Windorah at the council run park for the night.

It's been a busy week, we haven't done much other than drive, as we crossed the NT making our way to QLD. From Top Sprin...
16/08/2026

It's been a busy week, we haven't done much other than drive, as we crossed the NT making our way to QLD.
From Top Springs the road pit was a dramatic change from the road in, gone where the dips narrow roads and rocks, replaced with 2 lanes with light corrugations, oh and 2 patches of bull dust, these were well sign posted and tracks off to the edge where well worn. Still a bit of soft stuff but nothing like the centre of the road. We decided to camp at Banka Banka station for a couple of nights, unpowered on grass with water, nice.
The station has the original clay brick homestead still there, it now houses the bar. There are walks you can do and a lookout to watch the sunset from. We didn't do either, the driver has been battling a head cold since Kununurra, so rest and relax was on the cards.
We then headed down to Tenant Creek to fuel up, it was past our turnoff but given fuel was 30 cents a little cheaper and we were down to fumes, it was worth the extra km's. We had thought we would stop for a bit in Tenant Creek and have a look around but sadly the town appears to be slowly dying, the majority of the shops in the main street were boarded up, so we grabbed the fuel and headed back to the Barkly highway.
We stopped.for the night at a free camp just west of Barkly station, bushfires had been burning throughout the area, some still going, it was still burning off to the north but nowhere near us so all safe and it added to the sunset colors.
After a quick stop at Barkly station for some coffee, we pushed on, not a lot to see along this road as you are predominantly passing through cattle station after cattle station, just long straight stretches of grazing land.
We had planned on spending a night in Camooweal after crossing the border but where we planned on staying looked like it had shut the camping area off in preparation for an upcoming event, so we pushed on to Mt Isa, closing out our 1600km 3 state trip from Kununurra to here.

We have crossed into the NT, this means we have now visited every state and territory in Australia, although this is onl...
11/08/2026

We have crossed into the NT, this means we have now visited every state and territory in Australia, although this is only a quick visit as we will return when we have more time to explore everything.
We spent a night at Timber Creek CP where we ran into another Van Cruiser 🎉, of all the places to find one, a small little town in the middle of nowhere. The CP borders a fresh water creek, home to some crocs, now you might think this one is well away from the CP, when actually it's on the same side, you could literally walk down to it.
Today we headed on, turning off hwy 1 onto hwy 80, also known as Buchanan hwy as well as part of The Binns track. It was time to air down again, switch on the dust suppression and venture off. Now whoever decided to name this a highway must have been having a laugh, in places it's barely a road, with more dips than both the Oodnadatta and Gibb put together, in places there are dip signs every 20 meters, with more than 1 dip per sign 😂, but what a road. The changing landscape is special then you weave your way through the hills before dropping back out onto plains, you pass through station property where we found ourselves having to wait for cattle to clear the road, there are as many floodways as dips mostly dry but there are a couple of larger rivers still flowing. We have pulled up at the Top Springs hotel for the night, talk about a pub in the middle of nowhere 😁.
Tomorrow we continue our trek east, hoping all that rain doesn't close to many roads along our way.

We have finished the Gibb 😁, well that was last week 🤔, bit slow posting 🤫. After an uneventful crossing of the Pentecos...
11/08/2026

We have finished the Gibb 😁, well that was last week 🤔, bit slow posting 🤫.
After an uneventful crossing of the Pentecost we headed into Kununurra for a few nights to get some shopping and washing done. Yup it's been in the news a bit but we didn't have any issues, we ensured we had everything packed away and locked up every night, including the van door. A neighbor in the van park forgot and got a visitor at 2am 🤬.
Ivanhoe crossing had just opened a couple of weeks before our arrival, so we had the chance to drive over another iconic river crossing. We then looped through the farming region before stopping in at the oldest running still at the Hoochery distillery for a tasting and lunch, good food 🤤. In Kununurra there are a couple of lookouts you can go to as well as the national park just outside of town, there are walks there ranging from cat 1 to cat 5. They traverse their way around, up and down the rocky hills showing off some very pretty landscape.
We decided to clean some of the dust off the van, everything we touched or bumped into left red dirt marks on us so we gave the main areas a wipe over, including the windows, we can actually see out of them again! Most people dive into the car wash once they have finished the Gibb, but we knew we would be back on dirt within a week, so there was no point.

We spent a day relaxing before heading out from Mitchell Falls, the graders must have been working over the weekend as a...
04/08/2026

We spent a day relaxing before heading out from Mitchell Falls, the graders must have been working over the weekend as a lot of the road had been graded and was smoooooth 😗, however the parts still remaining where rough and slow going. After spending a night at the free camp on the Gibb River where we met up again with our Fury Road friends, who we have kinda unofficially been travelling with 😂, during several discussions we actually got around to finding out names, 2 weeks after our first meeting.
We are currently camped at Home Valley Station, along the way we passed another Van Cruiser heading west. It's still a joy for us both to see another Van Cruiser van, i don't know too many other manufacturers that have the same effect on their owners.
Previously we posted about a missing bolt from our suspension, it was not as easily fixed as we thought, we have lost several more since the initial one. After a phone call with Cruise Master little had been solved, it just didn't make sense to them or us, the bolt had no major job but to hold the adjuster in place. After a bit of playing around we found the main nut that holds the torsion bar in place was slightly loose. We borrowed a socket from a fellow camper and torqued it up to the required setting, replaced the missing bolt again and so far ITS STILL THERE 🎉🤣, although that could be the large quantity of loctite and the double nut doing this but 🤫 Seems the small movement in the bar may have been causing the issue. We rang cruise master back to let them know and asked if we needed to replace the main nut as it was working loose, they informed us that they should be torqued up every service, (10,000km). Something that possibly has not been getting done by the variety of places we have used to service the van over the years. So it will be off to the shops in Kununurra to get the 27mm socket to add to the tool kit and possibly another tube of loctite 😁
Life off the bitumen, still wouldn't trade it.

So we did what many said couldn't or shouldn't be done, we brought the van up to Mitchell Falls 😁, the road was as expec...
01/08/2026

So we did what many said couldn't or shouldn't be done, we brought the van up to Mitchell Falls 😁, the road was as expected, rough, rougher and wet. We had our deepest water crossing to date, with the water reaching the bottom of the door vent, a dribble got in.
The 187km trip from Drysdale took about 4 hrs to complete, at the start the road is beautiful,.flat and we could sit on 80, the last 80-90 km we didn't get above 60, towards the end we were below 40km/h, the corrugations where bad but the rocks and unexpected ditches were worse. We needed every bit of clearance we had at times to straddle some of the rocks, entrances into and out of some of the water crossing were steep, at times we had to angle our entry, with no signage at times we relied on picking up the changes in the vegetation to know when a crossing was coming. They were grading parts of the road but it wasn't really making it better, they were digging up large rocks and those they didn't dig up made large bumps.
There were steep descents that tested our skill, leaning on the gearbox in first gear whilst using the brakes to keep momentum under check, avoiding at all cost locking brakes. There's something about being the ONLY van here that makes you feel 😎.
Today we did the walk, well we choppered to the falls before completing the 4.8km hike out. The view of the falls from the air was as expected, spectacular, the hike out took you through and past some great scenery consisting of lakes and waterfalls. Such a spectacular place to visit. We have another day here before we start the journey out and continue our Gibb River road adventure.

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Mitchell Plateau, WA
6740

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