Ketchup from the Chef (it's taken a while).

Well, as Mike has said my time is now free of calculating the post mortem interval between someone's death and the discovery of their body by using the life cycle of blowflies, and of analysing blood splatter patterns at crime scenes for my forensic course - apart of course from his on the roof tent cover.
The kitchen has been sluiced out and I have been planning meals and working out what essentials we need to take, that we cannot get in the supermarkets in Morocco....

I was going to take a piccy of  Earl Grey Teabags but I've packed them and thrown away the box!
The mechanic has already included a photograph of  the  galley. The two metal containers on the left of the picture which previously held in flight plastic meals for Jersey Airlines, have proved to be incredibly useful.

Over the years they have gone through several different incarnations as we have trooped-trialled them to achieve the best format. Last year's push to the desert proved that just one shelf in the left hand box separating two 'Really Useful Boxes' worked the best. These contain all the basic cooking  requirements - salt, pepper, spices, oxo cubes, tomato paste, chopping board, bottle opener and corkscrew and so on. Priorities.... I was a girl guide you know.
Last year I found cooking in Morocco far more challenging than cooking in say France or Italy, or for that matter when the 'kids' come home (27 and 22) and want to relive their youth by having Mum cook sausages in buns in the van in the car park at the sea side.... generally accompanied by battering winds and curious children passing by who stare blankly in amazement at this yellow beast, from which Tony Blackburn is blasting at great levels from the 'wireless' (update on 25 Feb...no longer, apparently. This Hardy Annual of the Radio has been sacked.) and which is full of 4 adults scrunched together inside trying to keep warm.
I might add here that we get no build up of condensation from all this cooking and all these bodies because my darling husband has provided an extractor fan.
Hmmm. Back to the Moroccan  supermarkets which are usually only to be found close to large cities in the north. Once south of the Atlas mountains they are few and far between. Bread, fruit, vegetables and meat are readily available in all souks but great care is needed to ensure that the meat you ask for is in fact meat and not all mostly bone and gristle slipped in when you've been distracted. The first meat I bought last year using my schoolgirl French was 'fillet'. OK I thought, thinking of  Mr Tesco's Extra Special cuts, that'll be fine. What I got was a different matter. I am convinced that it was in fact the shopkeeper's old flipflops which he was taking the opportunity to recycle.
Chicken is a far better and easier option. Well, with one proviso. It comes with two legs (good) but it is still running around on them (not so good). At least, we don't have to 'do the deed' and it is FRESH. They even take the feathers off! My mother always said though, never to put warm food into the fridge......sorry!
So, and this is my justification for what I have already got packed....it is NECESSARY to take as many things as possible  that  (1) do not take up too much space and (2) are in plastic containers  [I have been listening] so that you can 'do' something  cordon bleu with the poor quality meat and vege available. I must remember to take that beef jerky sauce in the jar out....
 I've mentioned OXO cubes. I took about 3 last time and regretted it...you can get something similar 'out there' but it don't pack a punch. This time, I have take lightweight ingredients such as Spice Doctor curry mixes. I found these in Tesco and they consist of 3 sachets. One with dried spices for frying, then a base sauce of additional oomphy stuff and then the main sauce. In the middle of all this you add 250g of something else....meat, mushrooms, eggs, fish....I also take rice and pasta already bagged into portions for two.
I mentioned the fruit and vegetables. Oranges are sold everywhere at the road side and are wonderful. I wouldn't say that we bought any other fruit though. When you buy vege, you take one of the rather decrepit washing up bowls that are laying on top of the huge piles of tomatoes etc. into which you put everything you want. It is all weighed together and paid for in one go -minus the bowl. The quality is varied and you have to pick carefully through  unripe, over -ripe and furry items all in the same pile. My suggestion would be to pick from the top of the pile to avoid those at the bottom that have been investigated by cats or peed on by the huge number of feral dogs that abound.
Bread is available in all of the tiny shops which actually look like cigarette kiosks...it is in no way your Mother's Pride sliced in a resealable packet - but  round, about the size of a bread plate (?!), tasty but does not keep well. Occasionally, when we were out in the 'boonies' it became difficult to get. So I have also packaged up 'kits' so that I can make chapattis and drop scones. We did the latter last year using dried milk powder and dried egg. Just add 5 fluid ounces of water. Excellent but, time consuming if we wanted to get away quickly in the morning. We are intending to have some stop overs this time...
What's in the right hand flight box? Well that is also separated by a shelf  which sits about 4 inches from the top and takes the heavy duty wet wipes for the mechanic, the doggy poo bags which are a great item to have around ( no not for that... for rubbish bags. You need small ones as big ones when full niff very quickly). Pegs, loo roll... Underneath, is the large container which holds the day to day water, and the washing up stuff.
Washing up is done at the sink, specially constructed to fold up neatly against the inside of the back door.



We have two means of cooking. The gas stove inside and the portable Cadac which also uses gas. Replacing cylinders in Morocco can be interesting. Most look as if they are 40 years old, covered in rust and come with different gauges at the business end.....so take the widget from the empty one with you to ensure you get a perfect fit.
The Cadac is brilliant and enables us to roast a complete chicken, bar b q, griddle and so on. We use it most of the time when we are in Europe and I tend to wrap everything in foil to cook to save on the washing up. We took it last year 'down south' and will do this time, but we did use it less there. There is usually a wind which in conjunction with the inevitable sand makes for cooking outside sometimes challenging. But it rings the changes and we have also got wind breaks.
What other 'white goods'? The fridge...runs off the lecky. Having tried ordinary freezer boxes and cheap electric ones, it paid to throw money at it, and it keeps the beer and the white wine cold, snuggled in with warm chook, milk and chocolate.
There is the wood burning stove which is lovely to sit next to in the evenings..

The pipe is also good for drying your socks on.....last year a pair of my daughter's purple socks which I was 'borrowing' ended up melting on the pipe - it still has the marks - when a certain someone forgot to check them while I was showering.
Finally, there is the washing machine. Daphne is actually the prototype for the BBC's Tardis. The only difference being that they did not think yellow would be a good colour. There is a large tube with ends on it. Half fill with water and a smidge of washing up liquid, add dirty smalls, seal and attach firmly to the vehicle before a day's off road driving. Ready and clean for rinsing and drying at the end of the day having been well agitated for several hours.

This is a boring blog!

No, nobody's complained, that's just my opinion and as I'm writing this blog, I can confidently claim the majority view. Let's face it, a travel blog with no travel is about as good a sedative as a hot afternoon at a village cricket match. About as exciting as a wet Wednesday afternoon in Wigan. Not that I've got anything particular against mid-week activity undertaken in inclement weather. It's Wigan that's the problem. It wouldn't be a problem in, say, Barbados or Hawaii but Wigan, by comparison, has got a long way - uphill - to go before it comes close to being on anyone's list of Places to Visit on Early Closing Day. Star Trek probably wouldn't have gained the cult following it has if Cap'n Kirk had started too many episodes with "This is the log of the Starship Enterprise, laid up for yet another week in the dry dock on Alpha Centauri."

Let's review the content so far. I do this for new readers who've just dropped by, as my reader in the USA flogs through this drivel every week with loyalty verging on Unnatural Interest - only joking, Yank! The occasional visitor from Poland is also appreciated -Witaj mój przyjacielu! - but the sole "hit" from Romania happened to co-incide with our daughter being in Bucharest for the weekend, so I don't think I can count that on the scorecard of International Interest.

So, some droning on about how I managed to get 55kgs of tent from the storeroom to the roofrack without dropping it and, unbelievably, a photo of Daphne's back end cluttered up with plastic boxes...wot? I mean, FFS! Is this all there is? When we wrote the blog last year, we read somewhere that we should include all the things that go wrong, all the bad bits as well as the good stuff and the pretty pictures as readers "like" to hear how It's All Gone to Hell in a Handcart. So, I must apologise for not dropping the tent off the lash-up of a ramp. I'd like to say "It nearly happened", but actually ended up being a completely uneventful event other than for the doing up of the fixing bolts. We live alongside a country lane frequented by almost no-one except dog walkers and Sunday strollers. The latter group tend to be more refined persons - well, the gentlemen wear hats not hoods, which is almost an indication of aristocracy around here. And it was a small group of the latter that were treated to my loudly voiced opinion on the state of the universe, God and the weather when I skinned my freezing knuckles and sent a vital nut spinning into the middle distance to land in the previously-mentioned gravel, where flying metalwork goes to disappear forever. They might have been outraged but, then again, they might be representatives of our new but rapidly expanding Polish community and were just entertained. If they come back equipped with folding chairs and picnics, I'll try to be less profane since they seemed to have quite an interest in what was going on. Perhaps it was the metal detector that did it. I wasn't even aware that they were there and listening to my cursing, having earphones on an' all. Didn't find the nut, either.


Regarding the point of all this, there's not much to report this week. Again. I sorted out the paperwork to import Daphne via Tangier which is made a lot easier by visiting Tim Cullis' excellent guide. Find it here: http://www.morocco-knowledgebase.net

There's always something that can be improved, and in an attempt to improve the view of the navigation display I made this little gadget from some scrap aluminium:

OK, so what? Well, we found OSM mapping quite useful, unlike the rear view mirror which is largely redundant except for seeing how big our dust cloud is. Rather than remove the mirror, which is easy to do as Sue proved to my annoyance last year, we decided to make it comply with our "everything must be dual purpose" philosophy:

So here's our new Head-Up Display satnav. This lets us both see what's going on, or Sue can use the Garmin while I keep an eye on OSM. Any chance of disagreements over the navigation now removed...yeah, right.

 Anyway, despite my original misgivings, it doesn't block the view forwards as much as I'd thought and I don't need glasses to read it.

I'm getting interested in a New Noise that only happens when Daphne is running on smooth roads and the transmission is cold. It might be a wheel bearing or one of the diffs, but it's difficult to isolate from the driving seat. This isn't helped by the fact that I'm hightone deaf in my right ear, the result of a combination of firing guns without ear defenders and a career in and around aeroplanes and noisy jet engines. My time associated with Chinook helicopters probably either trashed my eardrums or was a natural defence mechanism since six years in the lefthand front seat were accompanied by a loud whining noise from the other side of the aircraft. I initially thought this was the front rotor gearbox but since it was often there before the engines were started.....This whining, which became more high-pitched when we began recruiting female aircrew has left me with a permanent disability and an aversion to pilots with t*ts. ;-)

An oil change has to be done before we leave, even though the present fill has got 3000 miles left in it. There, that's something for you to look forward to next week. Bet you can't wait. Still, less than 4 weeks to go before we head South.

 Sue did manage to lighten the load a bit - see previous regarding rearrangements in the kitchen department -  by transferring all the foodie stuff  that was in glass jars into plastic pots, but I still reckon we're taking too much. I tried to point out that folk in Morocco didn't seem undernourished and that we could probably replenish the larder fairly regularly and didn't need to fill all available space - that I need, obviously, for More Important (Man) Stuff - with comestibles which will  probably be available en route. After some negotiation we have reached a fair compromise. Sue will organise the feeding arrangements and I will shut up. Anyone seen my coat?

Let's play tents....

...while it's not raining. Having extracted the rooftent from under a pile of garden toolery, we remembered that there were some small jobs that needed to be done before we could put it back "up top". The two main ones were a repair to the side skirt and some means of fastening the waterproof transit cover since the completely useless zip broke within minutes of first use.

The skirt repair was fairly simple but the cover needed some thought. The zip fastener, even if it hadn't broken, was far too difficult to use. Given the two corners the zip had to pass around, that it's 2 metres off the ground and couldn't be done without lying horizontal across the (wet/dusty) roofrack for at least one side made it completely impractical. We'd held it on with bungee straps but we needed a better system. A search of the scrap box turned up some webbing, buckles and straps from an old tent. These we stitched to the cover at points around the edge...

The sail stitcher did a good job, but the material plus webbing was pretty tough to push through and I managed to break a needle and stab myself several times. OK, so the bloodstains are a bit overdone, but it really was a bugger of a job. Despite bringing the cover indoors for several hours to warm it up and hopefully make it a bit more supple, handling it was still much like trying to gift wrap a football with a sheet of hardboard.

 Now it fits and the edges can be pulled tight enough to stop water getting under the cover and wetting the tent.

The next thing was to get it into place.

As my old Science teacher would say, a "suitable system of planes, pulleys and levers" was set up and the task of getting a 55kg dead weight from ground to roof was a one-man job.

We'll leave the mattress indoors for the moment, in case the weather takes a turn for....

...the worse. This was Sunday morning, so glad we got it done the day before. I waited until things got a bit warmer before fighting with the awning, but this went back on fairly easily once I'd got the brackets and bolts lined up.

This is a great bit of gear. It unfolds like a giant bat wing and shades the side and back, over the table and back door. The legs that support it also support our custom made windbreak, so we can seal ourselves in from the weather.

Other odd jobs done: cable for the CB re-routed and the ground plane fixed to the roof, kitchen storage cleaned out and the GPS refitted to the co-pilot's seat.

Next week I need to put a guard around the rear worklight switch, so the chef can't turn it on accidentally and not notice for 15 hours......good job it's an LED.

Some new toys, and improving old ones.

We got one of these! Given that we're going to be a little farther away from help this year we decided that a little extra "insurance" might be wise. I picked up on the idea from information on another forum, and the item you see is the slightly more useful upgrade to the original "SOS" basic unit. Actually, the basic unit does a little more than that - but not much - and anyway, isn't available anymore. So, we got this one from Amazon - (where else, they're taking over the world). Apart from having a Panic Button, it can lay a trail of breadcrumbs that can be followed online by anyone we include in our plans and allows a certain number of text messages via satphone so we can keep in touch without having the rely on Maroc Telecom, wonderful though it might be.

We also decided to commit to using the carrier of the solar panel as a table. The usual table is heavy duty - and I mean heavy - and the cover for the solar panel is a quarter of the weight, so it made sense to use it instead. I beefed up the panel - which is just a bit of ratty old 5mm plywood - with some 25mm square battens - and that has stiffened it enough to make a useable table and it doesn't interfere with folding the solar panel away:

It fixes to the rear ladder via a steel tube welded to the ladder and an old tent pole which luckily had a final diameter just the right size to fit into it:

The other end is held up with an adjustable leg that began life as the bottom half of a crutch. It fits like this:

The table isn't as solid as the usual one as it is, but if the solar panel isn't removed, it's pretty good. I reckon that since we only use the table for preparing food and eating in the evenings, the solar panel will be refitted anyway, then table becomes much more substantial and it'll be on the underside, out of the way. Two jobs for the price of one, and a saving of about 3kg as well.

Daphne had her annual inspection by the Government rep last week, and passed with only one comment. The headlamp I had to replace last year - the one that shook itself to bits on the washboard roads - was slightly out of alignment. Nothing else to note so the maintenance effort was worth it. That said, the annual MoT test doesn't really mean a thing as far as "expedition reliability" is concerned. She could blow up tomorrow and still be legal.

....and as for us, well, the Darija studies continue and my beard is now ten days old and just getting to the itchy stage. I shaved it off twice last year as I couldn't put up with it and drive all day as well. I've done all the route planning - although the sat nav won't accept the routes so it'll be point-to-point like last year, unless Wikiloc works - we'll see. The compass and the map will always work....depending on who's using them....Ouch!