A Short Get Away (28-30 Sept) - Part 2

Within 55 hours of setting out on our trip, we were home again, but we excelled ourselves in achieving our objectives by managing to go out for breakfast not just once, but twice.

We were up relatively early this morning as I was intending to take another run along the seafront promenade, but a tight calf suggested that maybe that wasn't the wisest plan. So instead we left Prestatyn before 9am and headed the few miles west to Rhyl. There we pulled into Morrison's car park and found that their fuel station sells LPG. With LPG being increasingly difficult to find in the UK, it was a bonus to stumble upon such a cheap source. 

A stroll was had around the town (lots of charity shops) and along the seafront (much nicer than Prestatyn but completely dead with all of the businesses closed, whether due to the time of day, the time of year, the state of business, or various combinations thereof, we know not), before we repaired to an eatery for second breakfast. For the second time in two days we found ourselves somewhere that felt very safe from a Covid point of view - partiuclarly once the customers at the one other occupied table left and we had an entire room to ourselves.

Suitably fueled, we might then have wandered around a bit more, but it was just starting to spit with the rain that was forecast to last the rest of the day, so back to Bertie we headed and onwards to our next stop: a village just outside of Oswestry to pick up an internet purchase we'd made on Sunday night (more about that in a Project Erica post sometime soon). Arriving there an hour and a half earlier than scheduled, coffee and a crossword was had in the village car park whilst time was killed. 

It was still raining when we got home, but it didn't take many minutes to unpack Bertie; we hadn't taken much with us. 

Poor Bertie is now SORNed again. I'll be quite happy to re-tax him at the drop of a hat if it turns out that I've been essimistic in my expectations, and that we are in fact able to get away against sooner than anticipated. 

A Short Get Away (28-30 Sept)

Where's Bertie? He's sitting in the front garden of a bungalow in Prestatyn. The owners allow motorhomes to park here for £10 per night, including water and waste. One electric hook-up point is available on a coin-operated meter.
Weather: Yesterday fine and warm, today a showery start, but dry from just after 9am.

Back in the middle of March Bertie made the monster drive home from the south of Spain over the course of four days, since when he has, bar a one-hour interlude, sat patiently waiting to go somewhere else. At the end of March we SORNed him, but at the end of July we'd been without a car for a couple of weeks, and had an empty fridge and pantry, but supermarket delivery slots were still almost as rare as hen's teeth. So we re-taxed him and on 1 August we drove him to the supermarket. We also had optimism at that point that we would be taking him on a trip somewhere before the month was out.

By Saturday evening just gone there were just four days left in the month, Bertie still hadn't been anywhere and it had become clear that our intended month-long trip in October was going to have to be postponed. Having forked out for two months road tax already, there was a sudden imperative to get something for our money, before SORNing him again on Wednesday.

"Let's go to the seaside!" I said. A quick think about the nearest bit of seaside that's easy to reach via good roads, and I suggested Rhyl as a destination. We've only been there once before, when we stayed on a campsite for a couple of nights in Colin (Bertie's predecessor) when I was walking the Wales Coast Path. Whilst my experience of the town only extended to walking the seafront (at around 7am, I would guess, which perhaps didn't give a true representation), I didn't find the place as tacky or offensive as its 1980s reputation suggested I might*.

The fact that the campsite we'd previously stayed on was charging £25 per night to rent a small patch of grass didn't put us off entirely, after all, we were only going to be there for 2 nights and this year has been easy on almost all categories of our household budget. It was only as we were in Wales, proceeding along the A55 westwards yesterday (Monday) morning, that I asked Google Maps how far it was from the campsite into Rhyl itself and discovered that my memory had significantly shortened the distance. Why pay £25 to stay 2 miles away from town, when we could come to Prestatyn and pay £10 to be a 5-minute walk from the beach in one direction and town in the other?

There are possibly good answers to that last question. I wouldn't want to offend anyone who likes holidaying in Prestatyn, but I also haven't yet come to understand why anyone chooses to come here on holiday ... and I do appreciate that I'm saying that as someone who chose to come here on holiday. It's an odd place is Prestatyn; not like most seaside resorts I've visited in the past.

It's of no matter for our current purposes. Our objectives for this trip were:
- to have a few days break from Project Erica;
- to sit around reading a lot;
- to go out for breakfast;

and we've been doing a good job of achieving those aims. That also means there's not much to report as to our activities; we've mainly been sitting in the front garden of a bungalow on Marine Road (which, objectively, could come across as a strange way to choose to spend a couple of days!).

From this morning's run. Fine weather looking towards Rhyl; overcast looking back to Prestatyn.

There have been a couple of walks, and one run along the seafront (I nearly went to Rhyl this morning, but turned back just a couple of hundred metres short, at the point where the promenade was closed for engineering works), books have been read and we did indeed enjoy breakfast (brunch really; it was gone 11) out. The latter was an unexpectedly relaxing activity once we'd checked in, having chosen, entirely by chance, an establishment with good social distancing in place (although the 'order over the internet from your table' arrangement was a tiny bit stressful, particularly when I accidentally hit 'back' at an inopportune moment).

Quality breakfasts. The eggs were cooked to perfection.

We'll be back home tomorrow and who knows when Bertie's tyres will next hit the road?

^{(*Maybe I just like seaside resorts that are oft perceived to be tacky? We went to Blackpool around this time last year and to Benidorm earlier this year and on both occasions I opined that I wouldn't baulk at a cheap and cheerful holiday in either location.)}

Project Erica - Part 10: Kitchen

Rumour has it that I may have something to talk about this week that's not Erica-related ... but until that comes to pass, here's a link to this week's video:

Ordinarily we are detailed planners. We've done renovation projects for which we've put together Microsoft Project Gantt charts, and pretty well stuck to them, and although we didn't go quite that far on Erica, we did have a plan of attack. That plan went awry, and swiftly out of the window, when I didn't order things in a timely fashion (not to mention the issue of sequentially ordering three solar panels before we got one we were happy to fit) and to save us from sitting around for weeks on end we started doing things in an illogical order. That's meant that things have been built then have had to sit in the house so as to keep them out of the way when we were able to go back to doing the jobs that should have been done first. 

As shown in a video some weeks ago, we built the bed/sofa even though we weren't ready to fit it. We then got on with other preliminary stuff, until we found ourselves with a spell of good weather but without the materials we needed to do the next job. We weren't going to sit around twiddling our thumbs, so we started building the kitchen. It then languished in our dining room whilst we sorted out the solar panel and finished the ceiling, before we returned to it with our full attention. 

This video only covers the first half of the build. It's incredible that something that looks so simple has consumed quite so many hours (I almost wish we'd logged the hours, because I'm sure it's a ridiculous number at least six times higher than we would have anticipated). The gas locker was one of the greatest consumers of time. I can report that it is possible to squeeze a gas locker into the space between the wheel arch and the tailgate, but it would have been a whole lot easier if Erica had happened to be the longer wheelbased version of the Expert Tepee!

Project Erica - Part 9: Solar & Ceiling

It seems to me that no matter how many different types of crimp connector I buy, when I come to do the next job on Erica's wiring I find that I'm missing one that I need. That's why I've just had to fire up my laptop, for yet another purchase. It feels like I must be heading towards owning every type and size of connector there is on the market.

Whilst I''ve got a keyboard in front of me I thought I'd just pop in here to leave a link to the latest installment in the 'Project Erica' series, when we finally (a month later than anticipated) get a solar panel up onto the roof, which allowed us to insulate the roof and return the header liner to its rightful place. The latter action has done wonders to free up room in the house!

 

There's a bit in this video, in the attrociously framed shot where I'm talking about running an extra wire through one of the ribs, that makes me smile every time I watch it. It's subtle, but Mick nods whilst I'm talking, then gives a smirk that betrays that he knows he's being mischievous. The significance of this is in the 'outtakes' at the end of the video, showing a couple of snippets that immediately preceded that bit of footage. 

Right! Back to cutting bits of wire to size, even if I can't crimp all of the ends just yet. Meanwhile, Mick is out in the sunshine applying varnish to furniture.

Project Erica - Part 8: Erica Suffers a Rampectomy

Another week has passed and many more things have happened in Erica's world. Once again, progress has been piecemeal, but hopefully at some point soon everything will start coming together (although at the moment we find ourselves again in the situation of wanting to do A, but we can't do that until we do B, and we can't do B because of C, but we can't do C until Wednesday and thus we find ourselves frustratingly stalled during a period of good weather). 

Of all the things that we have done in the last week or so, the one that has won the race to have its video edited is the almost-removal of the wheelchair ramp (I say 'almost' because we left part of it, so as not to have a gaping hole in Erica's rear). The ramp had proved surprisingly useful for the first few weeks of the build, as walking up a ramp is much easier than constantly stepping up and down, particularly when carrying stuff) but we had reached the point where it was impinging on the construction of the gas locker.

The removal itself was more straightforward than we had anticipated, so the video isn't very long, even with my explanatory chat at the beginning and end. You can watch it here:

(As it went, not many sparks flew, but note in the cutting footage the jug of water on standby in case I set fire to the dust-sheets we'd rigged up to keep the metal shavings away from Erica's body!)

Project Erica - Part 7: Erica Gets a Carpeting

A lot of different things have happened in Erica's world over the last week. It started last weekend with the carpeting of the walls - a task for which Mick took responsibility, as it didn't seem sensible for both of us to don the necessary PPE. 

Neither of us has ever carpeted a wall before (nor used 4-way stretch carpet - a necessity when one has odd-shaped things like wheel arches to cover) and with the task requiring both wall and carpet to be sprayed with contact adhesive, it's not something you can keep redoing until you get it right. 

If you want to see how it went, and what the end result was, here's the video (just over 9 minutes - but you can always speed it up) of the activity:

Project Erica: The Continued Saga of the Solar

It is incredible (even inconceivable), not to mention slightly ridiculous, how much time has been spent on the question of the solar panel. It should have been so easy:

 Okay, perhaps I didn’t think it would be *quite* this simple…

The latest instalment in the saga is that before ordering the new solar panel, from a company called Photonic Universe, I sent them a few technical queries, one of which was really just a point of clarification. In their installation instructions for their ordinary flexible panels, they mandate that you must fill in all of the ridges in the roof so as to provide a flat surface for mounting, but in the instructions for the reinforced panel (which is what we’ve bought) this is only a recommendation, going on to say “spaces between ridges on a vehicle roof can be filled in […] this will make mounting easier and quality of bond better.” I just wanted to check that ease of mounting and quality of bond were the only reasons to fill those gaps, because to my mind it’s advantageous to leave them open (ventilation; no chance of rain water being stuck under the panel, rotting Erica’s body if there is any defect in her paint layers).

I really didn’t expect the answer I got, which was that we did need to fill those gaps, because otherwise the panel would flex where unsupported risking damage to the solar cells. I had a few issues with this answer:

1. It wasn’t the answer I wanted!
2. Surely having the panel firmly bonded either side of the 45mm gaps (with the bonding covering of 75% of the panel’s area) wouldn’t give scope for damaging flexion?
3. This is a reinforced panel, into which is integrated a sheet of anodised aluminium, which is sold as being one of the most robust flexible solar panels on the market – what’s the point in doing that if it still can’t cope with spanning small gaps?
4. The difference in wording of the instructions between the ‘normal’ semi-flexible panel and the reinforced one was marked: ‘you must’ versus ‘you can’ fill the gaps.

So, this morning (after another period of taking measurements on Erica’s roof and drawing diagrams; if any of our neighbours have witnessed our antics with our cardboard replica panel, they must be wondering what we’re up to) we had a phone call with the Product Advisor, feeling sure by that point that he must have thought we were referring to the non-reinforced panel.

But no – the answer still came back that we had to fill those gaps, otherwise we would risk invalidating the warranty. Or we could bond a solid sheet of something to the roof to provide a flat base before bonding the panel to that. “So what’s the point of selling a reinforced panel if that reinforcement doesn’t perform any useful function?” we asked and “Why do your instructions state this is optional if not doing it would invalidate the warranty”?

We got as far as the advice that “It’ll probably be fine if it’s not more than a 45mm gap it has to span”, before he went off to consult an engineer. Finally a definite and sensible answer: there is no problem with mounting the panel spanning the gaps; it will not cause it any damage.

Thank goodness for that! We took delivery of the panel this afternoon and our fingers are crossed that the forecast for a dry day on Saturday holds, so that we can finally get it mounted*.

(*If only we can make the decision as to whether to mount it along Erica’s length (fewer dips to span, but a longer cable run required) or across the width (more dips to span, but a shorter cable run).