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Published: March 22nd 2013
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Sion the Sheep
I had fun this morning building my snowman and playing on my sledge 32 days and counting - Suzy is standing in the snow. The weather has turned nasty. It began to snow last night and we woke up this morning to a heavy covering and a grey leaden sky. The journey to work was fraught to say the least with abandoned cars littering the road making it hazardous for overtaking and difficult for the gritters and the snow ploughs to clear the way. Gwernymynydd Hill was a shambles, drivers out of their cars with shovels trying to dig their way out. Cars left in the middle of the road. In the end I got to work,turned round and came home again. This time last year March was fairly temperate with mild weather and the reservoirs empty.Drought was forecast. What a difference a year makes. The clocks change next week and we have had Suzy almost a year and a month.
Swift have agreed to replace the damp locker and the necessary parts are on order.How long it will take for them to arrive is anyones guess but with time counting down it is highly unlikely the locker will be repaired before we leave for France on the 24th April.
Kathrein is
Sion
But now its time to think of somewhere warm still under the weather, under Suzy's blanket of snow she is still in need of a repair . The company who fitted it promised to ring us this week to tell us when they were coming up to repair her. By Wednesday we had heard nothing. A quick message - have you forgotten us and the response came back that their van was in the garage poorly and they might get up today Friday. This morning phone call - Where are you ? I have your address but cannot find you. It turned out they had an incorrect address and the fitter was in Worthing on the south coast which is 262 miles away from where we live. They are in Gloucester on Wednesday next week so we reminded them that we have been waiting two weeks already and have sat in every day this week for them so we hope they turn up next week.
At the moment we are considering buying a EuropaSim and unlocked E586 ( sounds like an additive to food) MiFi device. This costs £109 plus postage and packaging. It works on 3G and tranforms itself into a router which should enable us to
The guard sheep - in Rothenburg
I am hiding in the passenger window guarding the van while my owners sightsee in the pouring rain. use up 8 separate devices from it at the same time. We should be able to contact up the Laptop and the IPad at the same time. We have also downloaded a BT App onto the Smartphone which will connect to the device via WiFi and should make all our calls from Europe to home cheaper as they will be charged at home rates rather than roaming charges. We do love our gadgets.
Also needed is a GPS datalogger. We did have one go at this last year but failed miserably with Bluetooth. We have found one at a cost of £99.99 which will record our journeys with 122 waypoints at 1 a second. This equates to about 32 hours of travel . The data can then be downloaded to Google Maps or Google EArth and photographs can be geotagged in some way.
We still need to order 4 camping cheques for the non ACSI sites and buy or make up an extension lead for our outside one plate cooker. This was purchased so that during the summer we can cook outside and keep the smell of the bacon,sausage and egg out of the van.
Our Italian
Sion reflected in the mirror
He couldn't resist the toll stations in Croatia - they looked like little sheds go box will need to be ordered but this cannot be done until a week or so before we leave. At the same time we need to order a two week Slovenian vignette.
The euro is hanging around 1.15 to the pound. We need to stock up the Caxton Card for petrol and shopping but keep waiting to see what it is doing. It has gradually crept up but nothing worth writing home about.
The photographs are a mixture of Sion and his exploits and where I would like to be.
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