Peelies travels

The campsite at Segovia is situated about 3kms out of town, it’s quite small and in late May at least, there was a surprising amount of grass everywhere - which is unusual outside the UK I find. A groundsman was already cutting it just after breakfast, when we were ready to go sightseeing. The site is conveniently on a bus route with a bus every 15 mins. so it was a no-brainer to leave the Landy at home and use public transport. €1 each way - any distance, is a good deal for us tourists and I don’t suppose it manages without public funding. The roads are smooth and the buses are like new so austerity in Spain isn’t all bad. When we visited Pont du Gard in the south of France it was, to say the least, a surprisingly mighty construction, highly engineeed. Well here in the middle of Spain is another. Built by the Romans to convey water into the city in the same way as PdG provided for Nimes, the diffence here is that the aquaducto is right in the middle of the town! It was also built ...

This was our first time on a ferry for more than about ten hours and is billed as a cruise ferry by Brittany Ferries. This one left Portsmouth at 22:30 on Sunday 22 nd May 2016 and arrived in Bibao at 07:45 (local) on Tuesday, so we had two nights and a full day on board. The ferry (Cap Finistère) is of a similar size to that on the Hull Rotterdam P&O route although loading seemed to take longer. Somehow or other we were directed to a point just before a car mezzanine and our 2.4m (including roof box) would mean that on Tuesday we had to wait for that to be unloaded and then raised before we could disembark. As we walked around excitedly exploring, it wasn’t long before we found our cabin – a spacious four berth, with just enough room for the two of us. On Sunday night we weren’t ready for the quiz in the bar and instead made use of the spacious cabin. During the night Dawn discovered that her phone wasn’t on silent as it pinged two messages as we g...

Here we go again, another trip in the Land Rover. For those that don't know, this is a Defender 110 CSW with a 300TDi engine, registered in 1996. Since the previous trip to Greece and the Balkans, I have done further work to get the vehicle "up to scratch" which has been to replace the two sill channels, these are fastened to and run under the bottom of the three door pillars. Also I replaced the crossmember with a galvanised item (across the vehicle under the second row seats) and the aluminium heel up-stand under those seats. This is the heel up-stand and you can see where the aluminium has oxidised (white powder or a big hole) at the point where it has been in contact with the steel of the bracket behind it, to which it has been fixed (at some point in the last twenty years). I also worked on the engine - keeping it brief, I discovered that the turbo waste gate was jammed and must have been so since I bought the Landy in late 2014. The waste gat...