Wednesday 29 October 2014

Not Long To Go

Well it's been awhile since Greywell and the last update.
We have spent every weekend since at Wisborough Green and so far the weather has been on our side apart from one Saturday morning, we awoke to let Max out and was greeted by a thick layer of frost
 
 
Chilly though it was, by mid morning the sun was out and another smashing day
 
Most Saturdays we take Max for a long walk through the countryside to a favourite  The Bat & Ball pub and whilst walking there  I came across a beautiful vintage car out in the elements on the side of a country lane but in fantastic nick.



1969 VW Karmann Ghia  
I have not seen one of these for years and was surprised to see it parked on a side of the lane open to the elements and not stored away in a garage ! I'd love to own it
 
The walk is a good one as we are able to let Max off the leash for most of the way, but sadly all things come to an end ,when we got there we were told by the bar staff that the brewery had sold the pub and it was being turned into a wine bar / fine dining restaurant . The staff are now working their notice off and were devastated ! they had just had one of the most profitable years with the good summer and it was always busy when we visited, so sadly it would close in mid October
 
 
Luckily for us there are two other pubs in the village and later that evening we strolled back to the Three Crowns and sat in their garden catching the last few rays of sunshine

 
 
Well I still had a few more jobs to do and over the next few weeks I was able to get stuck into them
First job was to install a reversing camera and reversing sensors due to the length of the vehicle and there being no rear window unlike our previous MoHo
The other critical job was to install solar panels as we are going to be doing roughly 50/50 mix of campsites and aires/wildcamping and the later we would not have EHU and would have to rely on the leisure batteries .
Again most of the information I got through a few forums and also researched thru the net
The job took two days the first day I fitted the 2 x 100w semi flex panels to the roof and fitted the MPPT controller and wired to the batteries

 
 and the next day I wired it from the roof to the controller and viola free lecky  
 



So we are now ticking off the days to our "planned" trip, that being we have no fixed plans but a rough itinerary of the Countries we will visit. We have booked the Chunnel for the 12th Nov, we intend to travel thru France down to Portugal "Algarve"where we intend to spend xmas, we then plan on travelling into Southern Spain to Algeciras and catch a ferry over to Morocco in early January and stay there for a while, returning thru Spain and South of France into Italy, Austria. Germany and homewards
There are several things we need to tie up before we leave but we are steadily getting thru the list .
Once on the road we will travel when it suits us, the mileage may vary from a few hundred to a few miles if we see a place we like we will stop up, simple as ! we are in no rush and intend to take in the vista's on offer

So here we go 2 weeks and counting
This will more than likely be the last post until we are on the road "unless something major were to crop up" in France somewhere ? I then intend to update it on a weekly basis.