We leave in just under a week. Sleeping seems more difficult these days, stuff just keeps running through my head. I have made multitudinous lists of things to be done before we go - and nowhere near enough items have been crossed off. Never realised before just how many things we had going on!
Anyway, we finished the flat refurbishment so that's now ready to rent out. We meet the agents tomorrow to decide on asking prices, etc. We were hoping to do it all ourselves but there just isn't time to learn all the stuff you need to know these days. Plus, of course, we don't have time to wait for a tenant to turn up!
The shop which we run in Marlow is pretty well running itself now, which is good because from next week it's going to have to do just that.
The repairs to the motorhome were finally authorised last week but the weather really hasn't been helping us along here. It has been peeing down all week and blowing a gale to boot. Now it is blowing hard from the northwest and the wind bites through everything and reduces you to a shivering heap in moments. So we have found a big covered area to put the van in this weekend and Jeff and his lads will work on it on Monday. They are confident they will finish it before closing time. Let's hope so!
After it's finished we drive it to Marlow and park up in our Loading Bay by the shop. As this is not the most salubrious place on earth, we'll probably stay in the van overnight. We'll load it up during Tuesday then push off towards Dover. We want to be sure to clear the M25 before night. We'll overnight en route and go on down to Dover next morning.
That's the plan - now let's see how it works out in practice!
Thursday 3 December 2009
Saturday 21 November 2009
Progress of a sort
The Inurers phoned today to confirm they are sending someone to look at the damage (to see if Jeff's quotation is as reasonable as I think it is). The drawback, though, is that he can't get there until Thursday next week, which is cutting it a bit fine. Still, two weeks ought to be enough time to get it fixed, I suppose.....but the weather will have to help out here.
Wednesday 18 November 2009
Is that light up ahead the end of the tunnel - or an oncoming train...
You might think that a simple dent in the glass fibre skin (see piccie) wouldn't be that difficult to fix, might you not? I mean, we used to buy an Isopon kit from Halfords and fix worse things on our cars (back in the days when you actually could work on cars without violating Health & Safety regs and when you could fix anything mechanical with a set of socket spanners and a couple of screwdrivers - but I digress). So I was fairly optimistic that the Insurers nominated Coachworkers would be able to sort it quickly.
When I got there after a 150 mile drive in a howling gale it was clear they weren't very......, well, competent is the word which comes to mind. They were clearly put off by the size of the thing and, actually, they didn't seem to have anywhere big enough to put it. The "engineer" didn't even come outside to look at it, he stayed in the warm Reception area and shook his head mournfully. He did that drawing-in-breath-over-the-teeth thing that so-called craftsmen always seem to do. "That looks like a specialist job - you need a specialist coachworkers for that." I said I thought that's what they were (after all they were called Parkford Coachworks) but apparently there are specialists and specialists and they were only specialists.
So I took it back to Webb's where I bought it, who promised me on the phone that they could fix anything. Their bodywork "expert" did the same breath thing and said much the same as the other guy. However, they did know someone who almost certainly would be able to do it and he was coming in the very next day to fix something else. So I left it there and went home.
Jeff, who is a bloke of about 6' 4" (that's about 1.90 m for Metric enthusiasts) looked at it the following day and I went over to talk to him there. "No problem" was his diagnosis - and he would travel down to Brock to fix it on a day when we had a reasonable weather forcast, then come back on a subsequent day to paint it (hopefully the following day but it will be out in the open so the weather has to play ball here). He emailed me his very reasonable quotation today and I passed it on to the Insurance people. They will have to send someone to look at it and authorise the repair but it is now looking hopeful. Only trouble is we are booked on the ferry on 9 December, in three weeks time! It might not get painted before we go if the weather doesn't improve a bit - in fact it might leave the country still bandaged up!
Anyway, it's back in Brock and we are leaving it to the Insurers and to Jeff. I will phone everybody at regular intervals, though, so they get fe up with me and get it done.
So I took it back to Webb's where I bought it, who promised me on the phone that they could fix anything. Their bodywork "expert" did the same breath thing and said much the same as the other guy. However, they did know someone who almost certainly would be able to do it and he was coming in the very next day to fix something else. So I left it there and went home.
Jeff, who is a bloke of about 6' 4" (that's about 1.90 m for Metric enthusiasts) looked at it the following day and I went over to talk to him there. "No problem" was his diagnosis - and he would travel down to Brock to fix it on a day when we had a reasonable weather forcast, then come back on a subsequent day to paint it (hopefully the following day but it will be out in the open so the weather has to play ball here). He emailed me his very reasonable quotation today and I passed it on to the Insurance people. They will have to send someone to look at it and authorise the repair but it is now looking hopeful. Only trouble is we are booked on the ferry on 9 December, in three weeks time! It might not get painted before we go if the weather doesn't improve a bit - in fact it might leave the country still bandaged up!
Anyway, it's back in Brock and we are leaving it to the Insurers and to Jeff. I will phone everybody at regular intervals, though, so they get fe up with me and get it done.
Saturday 14 November 2009
Some you win, soome you lose....
On Tuesday I went down to the New Forest and fitted my super-clever refillable propane gas system which will keep us warm and toasty when we are in the mountains this winter and will never run out because we can always find a service station which serves LPG (Autogas). I may have to remind myself that I said that but hopefully not!
Anyway, once having fitted all the cylinders and tubes and things then of course it needed to be tested, which involved me in going to an LPG pump to fill up with gas. The nearest one was in Pennington, a few miles away, so I managed to turn the van around using only a two or three point turn and headed back towards the gate with a smile playing around my lips and just possibly a snatch of a tune on my breath. Which was, of course, when it all went horribly wrong.
As you can see from the photos which accompanied the last posting, there is a large amount of overhang at the front. What this means is that the top section is big enough for two people to sleep in there - but it also means you can't see upwards when driving forward. I was so busy concentrating on lining up to go through the gate without being at an angle to it (the gate isn't a huge amount wider than the van) that I didn't see that there was a low branch very near the gate. It was over 3 metres up - but unfortunately the van is about 3.2 metres high, so we made contact.
Now, the van weighs approximately three and a half tons so it doesn't stop easily except by using the brake and although I hit the brakes as soon as I heard a noise, it carried on forward about six inches. Since the branch is very solid and the bit that encountered the branch is made of glassfibre, it suffered somewhat. I didn't have the camera so I can't show you, but it doesn't look quite as pretty as it did.
Since we were expecting a storm at the end of the week (i.e. today, and believe me we have it now, it's blowing a gale out there) we decided, after getting the gas, that the tear would need to be patched up to prevent the bodywork from filling up with water. A piece of polythene sheeting about two foot square (60 cms for those who don't do Imperial) and a lot of gaffer tape actually produced a rather neat repair. I'm expecting to go down on Sunday to do other work on it so I will take the camera and you will be able see the effect. I'm taking it to the menders on Monday who will look at it and tell me if they can fix it.
Not an auspicious start to my motorhoming career - thank goodness I got insurance with a protected no claims bonus.
Anyway, once having fitted all the cylinders and tubes and things then of course it needed to be tested, which involved me in going to an LPG pump to fill up with gas. The nearest one was in Pennington, a few miles away, so I managed to turn the van around using only a two or three point turn and headed back towards the gate with a smile playing around my lips and just possibly a snatch of a tune on my breath. Which was, of course, when it all went horribly wrong.
As you can see from the photos which accompanied the last posting, there is a large amount of overhang at the front. What this means is that the top section is big enough for two people to sleep in there - but it also means you can't see upwards when driving forward. I was so busy concentrating on lining up to go through the gate without being at an angle to it (the gate isn't a huge amount wider than the van) that I didn't see that there was a low branch very near the gate. It was over 3 metres up - but unfortunately the van is about 3.2 metres high, so we made contact.
Now, the van weighs approximately three and a half tons so it doesn't stop easily except by using the brake and although I hit the brakes as soon as I heard a noise, it carried on forward about six inches. Since the branch is very solid and the bit that encountered the branch is made of glassfibre, it suffered somewhat. I didn't have the camera so I can't show you, but it doesn't look quite as pretty as it did.
Since we were expecting a storm at the end of the week (i.e. today, and believe me we have it now, it's blowing a gale out there) we decided, after getting the gas, that the tear would need to be patched up to prevent the bodywork from filling up with water. A piece of polythene sheeting about two foot square (60 cms for those who don't do Imperial) and a lot of gaffer tape actually produced a rather neat repair. I'm expecting to go down on Sunday to do other work on it so I will take the camera and you will be able see the effect. I'm taking it to the menders on Monday who will look at it and tell me if they can fix it.
Not an auspicious start to my motorhoming career - thank goodness I got insurance with a protected no claims bonus.
Saturday 7 November 2009
It all starts here...
We took delivery of the "big box" machine on Tuesday this week. It had seemed to me to get bigger every time I went to see it before delivery and when I finally got to drive it away it didn't seem to have got any smaller. To be fair it is 7.5 m. long, 3.1 m. high and 2.3 m. wide, so it doesn't fit into many car parks unless they cater for buses and HGV's.
We went over everything with the dealers to make sure it worked and decided to accept the couple of things that didn't. I then drove it down to my brother-in-law's hotel in the New Forest, the only place anywhere near here which has enough space to park it up. Here is the beast (it doesn't include the caravan next to it, though, and note that even in the UK we do get clear blue skies sometimes):
This is what it looks like inside:
We went over everything with the dealers to make sure it worked and decided to accept the couple of things that didn't. I then drove it down to my brother-in-law's hotel in the New Forest, the only place anywhere near here which has enough space to park it up. Here is the beast (it doesn't include the caravan next to it, though, and note that even in the UK we do get clear blue skies sometimes):
This is what it looks like inside:
The van handles nicely up to about 70 mph although overtaking trucks does tend to be a bit unsettling - there is a huge amount of "windage" so that slight surge you get in a car when you overtake a truck becomes rather more significant in the van. Still, if you grit your teeth and hang on you get past without swerving all over the road, so we'll get used to it!
There is a bunch of stuff to be done on it, I decided to fit a refillable gas supply for cooking and heating so we can top it up at LPG service stations - using Calor bottles over the Channel is a bit difficult as the suppliers there won't accept them for replacement. So if you run low you have to buy theirs. I also have a neat system for removing loo smells but it does need fitting. Those are the first two - I expect we'll think of others when we have tried living in it for a while.
More in a while....
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