Life’s a bit sucky right now.
Getting back from the Azores was expensive, and I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to enjoy being there. The town was very pleasant, nice little beach, I just needed to be somewhere else.
After spending the night in Lisbon airport I managed to leave my camera on the plane back to Manchester I didn’t realize until after I had cleared immigration, so I couldn’t go back to get it and ended up hanging around for most of the day trying to get it back. Mission accomplished eventually but by then my poor mother had given up waiting for me and the buses were a disaster.
So that was a pretty miserable two days of traveling, and then I had to face up to some mechanical issues with the van. FedEx didn’t lose the parts this time but it turned out that somebody in the past has built one van out of two, so my “early model” VW has late model steering gear and the parts didn’t fit! I ended up spending a day personally transporting the bits back to the supplier, having a long chat with him, and returning with the right ones.
It all took about a week, but in the meantime I did manage to get a few other small jobs done on the van so it wasn’t a complete waste of time. It was just frustrating and I’ve been spending a lot more money than I had planned to this summer.
Still, now that I’m ready to go it’s only a few days until The Big Retreat in Cambridgshire. Rather than sprinting to a channel port and launching straight into a long drive across France, I’ve decided to volunteer with Sherpas again. It will give me a few days to live with the van and it’ll be fun to meet the crew again.