Skip to main content

Landy living






It seems ages already but in fact this evening is our fourth in Argyll & Bute. Autumn touring is quite hard and makes those five, six or seven week hot continental trips seem like an easy dream.

The temperature outside at the moment is 6C although there’s absolutely no wind. Body heat alone is a hard way to stay warm and we aren’t intrepid campers.

The addition to the Landy that allows this trip is the diesel fuelled Eberspacher D2 air heater. This is fitted in a little metal box under the middle cubby and it pumps out 2KW of hot air in a nice controlled manner. There’s a temperature controller mounted remotely near the back door and the fan-blown air is directed from the heater box towards the rear of the accommodation. That’s why it’s 19C inside 😀




Tonight we are eating chicken and mushrooms with rice. The chef is busy but it only takes about twenty minutes.

The fridge is behind the driver’s seat and is a great addition. Set to maintain 4 degrees C, it runs very efficiently off the auxiliary battery, which itself is charged from the alternator and solar panel.









Since getting the lifting Icarus roof from Alu-Cab, we now have two floors. It might look a little cramped downstairs but we don’t sleep there. That’s what the upstairs is for. It’s a penthouse really, with fully opening panoramic windows, which right now are tightly closed.

The roof bars have been replaced with a 3/4 length Hannibal roof rack. This leaves room for a 100W solar panel at the back and the rack has a box right at the front, positioned so as to reduce the effort required to lift the roof (from the back). Getting onto the rack is easy with these steps and then sorting stuff in the box is simple too.










Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On y va

Hooray. We are off. The ferry was booked a few weeks ago and the pressure was then on to get all sorts of jobs finished on the house and Landy. Major cosmetic work was to cover the grey front doors with paint that matches the rest of the vehicle. On the engine a coolant leak had developed behind the water pump and so the P gasket and adjacent core plug were renewed. Also a cheapy head unit from those Chinese people replaced the old Sony fm radio. Now we have opened up the wonders of Car Play and all that comes with it. Finally the 9th gen iPad with WiFi became a 9th gen iPad with WiFi and ‘cellular’. This means we can use OsmAnd Maps which need no data and get their gps position off the ‘cellular’ chip in the iPad. More on this useful map in subsequent posts. We headed towards Portsmouth for a mid morning ferry via our old neighbours in S-I-V. There we had a great few hours updating each about our families and then proceeded to save the NHS, the country and the world too. I mean why no...
Post a Comment
Read more

Onwards

You can’t visit a classic car enthusiast without admiring their car and we got our timing right, as it was the monthly club meet on Sunday. This was held at the Hippodrome in Maisons Laffitte, so it was just up the road. The definition of ‘classic’ here is 30 years and so many of the vehicles there looked very familiar to us 😳. TR5 and TR6, MGB, RR, BMW, Maserati, of course the Jensen Interceptor that our host drives, 2CV, Caterham 7, a beautiful Austin Healy 3 litre and then this… This is identical to mine, a Fiat 850 Sport Coupé, that I owned from 1978-81. Seeing it, brought back memories of welding, brazing, stripped driveshaft splines, clutch on the M1 and many miles of amazing touring. We drove around France on a camping road trip for all of September 1978 and the following year did the Ardennes for a month too. Here’s Nige’s Jensen… Maisons Laffitte is a very nice area to the west of Paris centre. The mansion is now owned by a trust I think and is a beautiful building. All we ne...
Post a Comment
Read more

Towards Savoie

We stayed on the motorway, which for us is unusual in France but we have experienced the traffic calming in the towns and villages. A direct and fast journey was planned and achieved, with  a  nice morning stop and appropriate accompaniments. We arrived at Saint-Jean-de-Chevelu which is a little west of Lac du Bourget, the huge lake which has Aix- les-Bains on its eastern shore. We went to a previously researched campsite, Camping des lacs. This is a lovely spot of about 100 places for a mix of tents, camper-vans and smaller motor homes. There are also cabins and some that were a bit like shepherd’s huts. It’s situated next to two small lakes (surprise!) and there’s a ring of small mountains around. These would have been peri-glacial lakes 🥸 back at the last ice age and have now become a joint playground and eco place. You can swim, fish and respect ‘nature’ here but need to get in the right part at the right time to do what’s allowed. A lady pecheur told us of carp and ...
Post a Comment
Read more