We woke up this morning safe in the knowledge that unless one of us lay underneath the campervan in the pouring rain and fixed it, we wouldn’t be going anywhere.
Fortunately, I’ve got a bad back and I have instructed Lee.
We needed to cut up part of the pipes from the heating system in order to use them to join the cooling system back together. It’s hard to explain, if I assume you’re reading this with no knowledge of mechanics! In simple terms, for this particular engine it is not possible to block off the pipe and continue as you might think, coolant must flow around the engine and that includes the broken pipe. So what this boils down to is that it’s raining, cold and we need a hacksaw to bodge this back together. Fortunately a bloke down the road has got one and fairly quickly she is patched back up and we’re able to refill the coolant and check everything is working properly. In fact I think I spent longer trying to fit the duvet back in its case, while Lee tried to escape from overly chatty hacksaw man, than it took to fix the engine. Luckily I brought spare antifreeze and we had enough water on board to refill the radiator which it turns out was completely empty.
This does mean we’ve lost a chunk of our morning though, but the weather is pretty dismal so we decided that the best use of today is to use it to drive to the next place we want to go.
We’re heading for Torridon to bide our time for enough of a decent day to make it over the Pass of the Cattle into Applecross. A miserable day like this warrants a pub, so at this moment we’re a few drinks down in the Torridon Inn who have kindly agreed to let us camp in the car park as long as we have dinner. There’s also a live band on tonight so the perfect way to spend a wet, foggy afternoon.
The main thing today is the impressive list of whiskeys at the pub:
The Kombi Chronicles 