Yet another breakdown...!!

Today we wanted to drive around Lancefield and visit a few places. On our way back the van stalled in the main street and the van wouldn't go anymore. We got back to the Smiths on foot and told them that our van has brokendown once again. They tell us not to worry and that they know a mechanic who can have a look at it and repair it. In the mean time Ben tries to see what is wrong with it. It seems like the fuel pump is giving us trouble again... The following day, Kevin and Val thought of taking us to their mechanic friend who lives in Sunshine just before Melbourne. They take their car and we follow them in our van hoping it will get there allright. Kevin took a tow rope just in case we needed it....and we DID !!! The van didn't want to go up the steep hill that we have to drive up to get on the road that will take us to Melbourne. We had to stop on the side. Kevin and Val who didn't see us stop carried on up the hill until the top and when they realised we weren't behind them anymore came back. Kevin told Ben to try and get up the hill by keep on reeving the car while going up, as the hill was too steep for Kevins car to be able to tow our van up. We managed to get the van up the hill after a few long minutes and from there Kevin decided to drive slowly in front of us in case we had another problem. 
We engaged on the freeway and after a few kms the van stopped again. Kevin decided to stop and to tow the van to Sunshine. Unfortunatly for us when we got there the mechanic Kev and Val wanted us to see was not there so they had to ask another mechanic whom they also know (Vince) to take a look at the van. He said if will take a while and told us we should go for a drive somewhere and come back afterwards. Ben also asked him if he had second hand tyres for us and he said he did but they were expensive and Ben said that he would see about tyres later and that he would rather get the fuel pump sorted out first.


Kevin and Val took us for a drive around Melbourne. When we got back a couple of hours later, Ben asked to see what had been done to the van and when he saw what the guy did to it he wasn't very happy. First of all the guy changed the tyres meanwhile we had asked him not to and secondly he tried to fix up the fuel pipe y adding a pipe and other things and changing the original place of the fuel pump. He said that the van wasn't going well ecause the fuel pump wasn't in the right place. Ben didn't think much of him at all but what could we say. The last straw was when we went into his office to pay, he wanted to charge us nearly $200 for what he had done to the van on which he hadn't done much at all and he had changed the tyres meanwhile Ben had told him not to. I started crying because we had spent nearly $300 to get our fuel pump changed just a couple of weeks before. The guy got a bit excited but told us to take the repairs as a gift. He also told us before we left that our van was rubbish and Kevin told us that when he told him that we wanted to go around Australia he laughed.... Well we will see....