Taking (in) a shower.

OK, so I cheated...this isn't really a meteor but my attempt to draw what we saw - but it looks just like one, honest!

Saturday night. But we didn't get (very) wet as the "shower" was of meteors - the Perseid show. Apparently an annual event, although a Scottish summer rarely has a clear night sky so we've never seen it... So, after a tip-off from Kristen we decided to take ourselves off to the coast again and try to get a good view of it since the forecast was good and we'd have a clear view to the north with no lights. Or so we hoped, anyway. I had a bit of a practice with the fancy menus on my camera and we thought we might get some good shots of the action.

Another reason for going out again was to test the new tent cover that we've had made. It completely replaces the original and knackered zip-on cover. With the habit that zips have to break or jam, and the huge faff we've experienced with this type of cover in the past made us choose to use straps instead. Tim made the new cover to incorporate some of the old one so there's a reasonable weather seal all around when the straps are snugged down, but the major advantage is, we hope, the ability to do most of the packing and unpacking from ground level. This will avoid at least some of the need to crawl about on top of the tent with the risk - nay, racing certainty - that one day I'll fall off.

Once the side straps are released the whole cover can be lifted off and stowed away. Only the front corners are formed, so it's much easier to put on. The rear corners - the ones that caused most grief before - are simply folded over like "hospital corners" on a bed sheet and fastened with a buckle.

The straps use the roofrack as a fastening point.

That removes the struggle to force a square corner over a point where it won't fit.

All the ladder parts can now be stowed under the cover as well as the support for the "Jumbo entrance porch" so we don't have to mess about fastening that to the underneath of the rack. The colour is suitably Deserty and we asked Tim to put the Hannibal patches back on it. It looks good and works well although we haven't yet trialled it in really wet conditions on a long journey. However it performs it'll be an improvement on what we had before and quite a bit cheaper than a new Hannibal cover- not to mention that we didn't need to take the tent off to fit it. That's a major bonus.. Some fine tuning of the buckle positions are needed on the awning side as we've now moved that to the higher setting. This might make the side curtains hang a little better. We also need to think about some kind of outlet in one of the side curtains for the stove flue. Since we don't want to make a hole in the roof section, the thing we need is this:

This will avoid the need to keep the door open....but we need to think carefully about which side to put it. The flue needs support from the awning frame and we don't want smoke blowing into the roof tent. It wouldn't be ideal to have the stove right in the middle of the space either since the table will only hang neatly from one point so the chairs would be too close to the stove, and it gets really hot. Maybe we won't get an ideal solution to this given the variation in all of these situations.

All set for some star gazing

Another great view from the kitchen door.

Some of our "neighbours" farther up the beach were clearly in Party Mood and invited us along to join in. They were celebrating a birthday and gave us a great welcome,complete with music and champagne. We spent a few hours with the party as the rain fell, the drink flowed and the songs got louder. By the time the rain stopped and the skies cleared I was in no state to get involved in complicated photography which is why this post just has my Artist's Impression of what followed. Sue was feeling a little wobbly as a result of sampling "a tiny drop" - she assures me - of some homemade tipple that had, shall we say, an unusual provenance. I stayed on the beach, away from the flames, and got a good view, as well as a stiff neck, watching the "shooting stars". It takes some concentration as well as determination since they don't exactly appear to order, but in 30 minutes I saw 4 very impressive streaks of light, one of which was trailing sparks!

...and another little bit of "fine tuning". The levelling wedges have always been stored underneath the floor, so we've made a neater job of the storage solution.



They're already pretty bashed about so a little more damage won't have much effect. Keeping them here gets the mud and crud out of the "dry" area inside and they're easy to get at when we park, given that they're the first things we need to sort out before we can unpack the tent. OK, so they're vulnerable to damage and theft but it's a risk worth taking and makes very good use of otherwise unuseable space. Although they look pretty obvious in the photo, in reality they're pretty well hidden under the body. I did, a long time ago, paint them black but this has worn off. I think you can buy these in black plastic anyway, so maybe, when they eventually have to be replaced, we'll get the "camouflaged" versions. No doubt they'll then be so hard to see we'll leave them behind one day....