We’ve had all of ‘em over the last 2 days – we’re now Thursday 29th June. I think it was 2 days ago that I last tried to upload something but the connection was iffy and the word processor crashed before I managed to save what had taken an hour to write, so I think I gave up. I can’t check, actually, to see what I achieved since the wifi at our present site can only be connected by walking 200 metres up the hill. That little trek will have to wait until the bar opens, I think.
We’ve stopped early today since our nerves are shredded and
we’re physically knackered after 2 days of quite demanding driving and
navigation. Last night was cold and wet and packing up this morning took longer
than we’ve become used to as all the covers were cold and wouldn’t fit anymore.
By the time I’d spent 40 minutes crawling about on the roof, trying to zip up
and tie down all the stuff, I was soaked. Last night we had another
thunderstorm. The pattern appears to be a clear morning, getting up to about
22C by early afternoon, then getting increasingly cloudy until about 4, when
the thunderstorms begin. My Granny used to say that “thunder is the noise God
makes when He moves the furniture around in heaven”. If this is true, then he
was throwing all his pianos downstairs last night.
Yesterday morning brought us to the hardest, rockiest uphill
track we’ve found so far, and the first time The Navigator had to dismount to
see me safely over the boulders and gullies. These are noted in The Book with warning
triangles such as “Ornieres Profonde”, “Ornieres puis Piste Cassante” and
“Gissante par Temps Pluvieux”, all of which can be summed up as “bloody tricky
ground – go slow!” The recent rain probably hasn’t caused these deep ruts but
the overnight rain hasn’t made them any easier to negotiate, particularly as
the earth is a sticky-but-slippery red clay.
At the time it seemed like real
knife-edge stuff but I’ve just had a look at the video and some “after action”
photos and you’d be forgiven for yawning and asking what the drama was about.
They really don’t do the situation justice but we had our heart rates raised by
quite a bit. Maybe like the fisherman’s “one that got away” story, but we’ll
never convince anyone of how it feels to be halfway up a mountain, committed to
going forward because we can’t go back and expecting a nasty mechanical crunch
at any second which will bring us to a shuddering halt with a major problem to solve.
On our own. Over the last 3 days we’ve hardly seen a soul while we’ve been away
from tarmac, which has been most of the time. Progress has been measured in
single figures per hour for most of yesterday and today but we still appear to
have no major damage.
There’s a lot of cosmetic wreckage but I’m sure it’ll polish
out….In addition to the scratches there are a few bent bits and some dents, a
lot of mud and some shiny bits on the chassis that weren’t there a week ago. I’m
really glad that I put the bush cables back on as the foliage we’ve bashed
through over the past 2 days would’ve done some damage otherwise. Today I
caught the whiplash of an overhanging deadfall pine as it sprang back through
the window, luckily missing my eyes. Windows up halfway from now on. Lotsa fun,
though! Nothing appears to have fallen off. Yet.
Elly has had her share of tribulations, though. I mentioned
the fuel leak –the second one – and we fixed that with a short bit of fuel hose
and an M8 stud tightened down with a nut.
The original “modification” involved a valve cap, bodge
(that is, “duck”) tape and a jubilee clip to hold it all together. Dead
professional and presumably done by the people who rebuilt the chassis although
I think I recognise the handiwork of PITA again. It might be fine for the wild
terrain of Haywards Heath but F*ck All use in the conditions we’ve been driving
in. Or anywhere else, actually.
The Demented Budgie that’s taken up residence in the engine
room is proving hard to trap. I thought it was the bearing in the belt
tensioner, but having applied some 1st Order Mechanics to it, I
might be wrong. The squeak is getting worse, so pretty soon I’ll just have to
change it “on spec” to see if that cures it.
Now that we’ve decided to use the Waeco fridge which sits on
top of the fuse box area….not so easy and required a major unload. Anyway, the
culprit was a broken earth connector inside the box so I swapped it for one
that wasn’t and lights and water pump were restored. This will have to be
rethought at home and a decent fuse/CB panel built in to replace the present
Oriental item. Still, that’s what “shakedown trips” are for, innit?
More importantly, we lost a lot of our braking power when
the friction pad on one of the front brakes broke off. The nasty graunching
sound – and a grinding feeling through the pedal – was a bit of a clue that
things were suddenly Not Right. We were about 5000 feet up a very windy track
when this little snag was discovered. We limped down the mountain in Low box,
using the engine as a brake as much as we could, until we arrived at the main
road. Alongside this was a goat shed and goatherd. We explained the problem
we’d got and asked for the nearest garage. Now, I’ve often had to drive to the
next town, or even city, to get spare parts or work done on cars, but never to
the next country. The nearest “help” was in Andorra, an hour away, he
explained, and with generous gestures indicated the dangerous, downhill,
hairpin-bend nature of the journey. He obviously thought we wouldn’t make it….but
not only could we get new pads, we could get another flag sticker for the
scoreboard!
Well, with a bit of help from our family IT consultant/International
search engine back home we limped into the Jaguar Landrover dealer in Andorra la
Vella just in time to see them bugger off for a 2 hour siesta. We spent the
time camping in their carpark, bedding hung out to air, looking like a couple
of Pikeys and attracting a lot of sniffy looks from the Mercedes franchise next
door. The Navigator got the phrase book out and wrote down an appropriate form
of words so we were at the desk seconds after the doors reopened. We left with
a brand new set of front pads, “pastilla de freno” if anyone ever needs to
know, while they took possession of 103 of our Euros…I could’ve bought 3 sets
for that money at home. Which is probably what PITA did and the reason they fell apart.
It being well after 3pm we decided to make for the nearest
campsite to get Elly sorted out but, as we had to pass the biggest supermarket
we’d seen in Europe on the way out, it wasn’t going to be a quick exit, was it?
We also took the opportunity to refuel now that it wasn’t all going to spill
out and found that the price of diesel in Andorra is about 87 cents a litre –
about 2/3rds of the price just over the border. This might explain why the
parking lot was chokka with “E” plated cars.
The job on the brakes took about 90 minutes and was
interesting for what it revealed about the condition of the brakes on the
“good” side.
When I took those pads out the inner one just fell apart in
my hands. I’d checked these before we left and I estimated they’d got about
half their life left. Hmmm. The outside half of both sets were still barely
worn, so something’s not right there. The NS disc is quite scored too, which
isn’t surprising given that we’d been forcing the bare metal backing plate against
it for most of the day, so that’s another job for back home. It’ll do until
then.
While I was working on the brakes I had one eye on the
weather, particularly some very threatening looking clouds that were building
up.
This is the underneath of a Cumulo Nimbus cloud, and is the
first one I’ve ever watched “boil up” from almost nothing right before my eyes.
From a few puffy clouds, this monster appeared in about 15 minutes, bringing
with it a really violent squall. No booming thunder or flashing lights, though,
which made it all the more threatening, I thought. Luckily everything was
re-assembled and tools stowed away before that happened.
Finally, at least on the list of woes, the steering has
developed a nasty wobble at about 50mph. Fine at slower speeds and last night I
jacked her up and had a really good wiggle of all the joints and checked the
wheel bearings with no obvious culprit found. It feels just like an
out-of-balance wheel and only made itself felt after I’d done the brake repair,
so maybe if I turn the wheels a bit on the studs, or swap the back wheels for
the front…? I’ll do that tomorrow before we leave. I don’t fancy having to
drive 1000 miles home at 45mph.
As for the scenery, you’d be forgiven for thinking that we’d
stopped looking at it, which certainly isn’t true, although what’s happening 6
feet in front of us has held the attention a lot recently. We’ve done a lot of
climbing up on rough tracks to get views like these:
 |
| Looking back to where we were 5 minutes ago |
And driven a lot on narrow roads that, back home, would be little
used farm tracks but here are obviously major routes between villages, most of
which are isolated and perched on impossible slopes or pyramid-hills. An
example was Pesonada – a true One Horse Town and it was away on its holidays.
Actually nobody ever seems to be at home, horses or otherwise. A few of the tracks have passed through these
places and the Road Book helpfully suggests that we should “follow the main road
through to the other side”. The main road, though, bears little difference to
all the others which can be side streets with dead ends or impossible corners. All are barely wide enough for us to negotiate, generally
steep, of mediaeval dimensions and with no way to see around the next corner to
predict what lies ahead. Several times now we’ve finished up in someone’s back
yard and had to make a very slow and careful retreat to the sound of angry dogs,
and GPS is no help either. Our Garmin, if we choose to use it, doesn’t seem to
know where most of these little places are, let alone that “Main Street” can
only be accessed by passing under an archway that is quite a bit lower than our
roof is high. We really must make an effort to stop and explore some of these
but so far we’ve happened on them late in the afternoon when the focus is on
finding somewhere to stop for the night, which is often more of a problem that
we’d expected. Generally solved by the use of several sources of information,
but our electronic “devices” are beginning to play games with us so perhaps we
need better maps….some old story, eh? “Yer can’t beat the Old Ways….”
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