Countdown to takeoff.

Less than a week to go now. Final preparations can now be made since the rain and gales and floods of the past week have abated, for today at least.

We needed to have a dummy run of roof tent set-up as well as putting on things like mattress toppers (that make such a difference to comfort) and fitting the Jumbo flysheet. When the sun came out today we unwrapped the tent to find....water. Obviously the tent cover isn't as watertight as it should be. In fact it has suffered quite a bit over the years from UV degradation. Remember TPO's claim that it had been "always garaged "? Frankly this is, to coin a phrase, Utter B*llocks. The green algae on the roof of the truck told the story of how much time had been spent outside and going nowhere, but the tent cover shouts it. You don't get this amount of UV from electric lights!

This should've been a bit of a clue too - the bright bits on the rack are where the tent and solar panel covered it. The manky green bit with the vegetable matter was the part ..ahem...covered by the garage roof. Allegedly.

Anyway, we unwrapped the tent today to find the floor awash and the mattress soaked, and that's having gone nowhere. I guess you could say that it was a good idea to check it but the intention was to just fit the flysheet - we didn't anticipate this problem. So, everything out and the inside mopped. The mattress was pouring water and needed considerable effort to get it out without damage, and then some serious attention to dry it..

The warmest place is the greenhouse. By the time we'd got it there the worst of the water had drained out otherwise it'd have been too heavy to lift. Now we're hoping for quite a few hours of sunshine to dry it completely. If we hadn't opened the tent up we'd have found this mess on our first night away, next Thursday, which wouldn't have been the greatest start to our holiday. Clearly we can't rely on the travel cover to keep anything dry so we'll have to come up with an alternative. I must say that my first reaction was to take the whole thing off and substitute the Oz-tent. That's waterproof, a damned sight lighter and, from our experience today a lot quicker too.

We called Tim of Stitch-It-And-Fix-It who's made some covers for us previously but the time available to make a new one isn't enough to do a proper job. Instead we'll make up something from a groundsheet and hope it works well enough to keep us comfortable for the next 3 weeks.

While Mike was cursing, I was busy doing the final sorting of the kitchen/bedroom. There isn't as much useable space in this arrangement as we had before but Mike has decided  - been persuaded - to move the spare parts somewhere else so now I have the use of all the storage bins. The rearmost one was blocked by the toolkit. By storing our Big Knife under it, it's lifted it enough for the lid to come out easily. Not to mention keeping the knife out of the sight of inquisitive authority.

We considered our options where the roof tent was concerned. It would be a real pain to have to remove it at this late stage but we need some way to guarantee a dry bed if we've had a day of driving in the rain.

We made a slip cover from a cheap DIY store plastic tarpaulin which will keep  the mattress dry. It'll be a bit of a nuisance to slide it over the mattress every day but it will do the job. On top of that - almost literally - we'll make a cover for the cover - of the folded tent, that is. We've an unused groundsheet that we can cut up to make a rainproof protector until we can replace the useless thing already there. Again, more delays are anticipated in putting this on and tying it down. So much for the often-cited advantage of a fold-out tent. "Quick Pitch" it ain't, and there's no way we'll risk keeping the bedding in it when driving. If it comes to it we can sleep inside, but not in a soggy duvet.

Finally, a re-christening of the truck.


We decided that "Willoughby" was too much to spell out all the time. Mike suggested "PITA" - pronounced Peter but an acronym for Pain In The *rse. He thought this was particularly appropriate given our experience with it and TPO so far, but in the end we settled on "Elisfor". Now this might sound like an odd name, but we got here by recalling a joke we used to have with the kids when they were young. They had an alphabet book which listed animals by letter. On one page "R is for Rabbit" became the rabbit's name - Risfor. Only a short leap of imagination, then, to "L is for.....". And easier to write.