InvictaMoto's On The Road Again!

The navigation upgrade hasn't been doing too well.  I spent a few days mapping the early days of our upcoming trip to Spain into the app before I paid for the upgrade. What the **** have I done? It didn't work.  I have already blogged about the offline mapping problem. The maps wouldn't download to the SD card in my phone. This was fixed, in part, when I tested to see if the maps would download to the internal memory. It's not the solution I would choose, but I have enough internal storage to cover it. The next problem has been the sound. The mapping works very well. I can plan routes with multiple waypoints and download to the phone and then navigate. It works really well. Except there's no voice. Why? Most of my tests have been done in the car. We have a Nissan Juke. And there lies the problem. On Sunday I did a test in the motorhome. The sound worked. Just a short run to Dover to get LPG. We had barely left the house when the voice chimed up.  At the time I was h...

Whilst I was concerned with the MyRouteApp problems, blogged elsewhere, I was in a quandary. Give up on MyRouteApp Navigation and simply go through the maps in Google Maps and enter the coords into the Ohrex? I leant towards the latter. So using MyRouteApp,  where waypoints display the coords, I was able to create "favourites" in the Ohrex. With MyRouteApp seemingly fixed, I returned to the holiday planning. Once Sandaya confirmed the booking for three nights in Valencia I started looking for routes towards "home". There are eight nights after Valencia to be filled.  I still want to call in or even stay at Canfranc Station.  My brother Neill and I stopped off here for a look around and lunch after the Somport Pass on the way to Morella  in Aragón in September 2022.  In the motorhome we will be taking the Somport Tunnel! The massive old station was a building site as it was being transformed into a luxury hotel. It was closed and behind fences. It's now open and ...

Today's jaunt for Molly was to the BP petrol station by Dover Western Docks. Essentially to fill the LPG bottles and maybe a snifter of diesel. But also to give MyRouteApp Navigation one last chance. I set a route and it worked. We had sound.  We are off the Spain in just over a week and have been seeing Facebook and YouTube posts about how cheap diesel is on Spain. Plus that it's getting more difficult to get LPG due to some change on Spanish or EU law. Whatever! Hence the massive 98p spent on LPG today.  As for diesel. It was 159.9 per litre so I decided to make sure we had enough in the tank for the drive to Portsmouth and the Brittany Ferries shop, and enough to find some cheap diesel ⛽ in Spain! As usual the pump clocks over the amount you want. Trying to stop firstly at £30, then £35 led to £40... Eventually I stopped at £42.02. Add the 98p and it's a round £43!!!! So today we have managed around 30 miles. As it was a part fill the Fuelly app won't give a miles pe...

I have finally had confirmation from Sandaya that the three nights I have booked in their Valencia campsite have been confirmed.  It's taken a few days but I expect they have loads of bookings coming in online and they have loads of sites in their group too.  I was going to book with ACSI but for that rate you get the smallest pitch. It's only a few euros more to have the larger pitch and with the "three nights for the price of two" offer it works out at about €25 per night including EHU and the dog!   Not too bad.   For now I am going to simply print out all the stuff we need on the trip and get it fixed to my clipboard!  :) There is a lot to do. This week I went around the van and checked all the doors that might rattle and hum when we are on the road.  Some sticky backed felt pads seem to have firmed them up and taken up the play in the doors.   We also bought a mattress topper. When the bed is made up from the ben...

I had some replies to my ticket logged with MyRouteApp and also on their users forum.  None of them were all that useful until around 10pm BST tonight. See previous blog linked below... "Have you tried installing a map, any map, onto the phone and not using the SD card....?" The answer to that was no I haven't. I use the SD card on the Motorola G50 for music and photo storage. Anything taken on the phone camera goes to the SD card.  I have around 60GB of music there that is an amalgamation of Amazon Music downloads and the entire iTunes library off the laptop.  I have no problem downloading from Amazon Music if and when I buy a new album on MP3. Photos are stored without any errors. So it never occurred to me that there could be a problem.  There obviously is a problem though, as I tried to install "England" using the menu in the MyRouteApp. I switched off the SD card option in the app.   Instead of it flickering on the download arrow it...

I have been using MyRouteApp, and its predecessor Tyre, for about a decade. I use it mostly to create routes for the TomTom 410 that I use on the bikes and have done for many years. I decided that as an alternative to the Ohrex satnav that we have been using in the motorhome for two years, that I would upgrade to the Navigation add-on in MyRouteApp. An upgrade a year or so ago means that with Gold membership I can plan routes that take into consideration the overall dimensions on Molly the motorhome to avoid low bridges and narrow roads. That's the theory.   The Navigation uses Here maps. It was a simple job to sign up and £15.95 later through PayPal the navigation button on routes in the app on my phone lights up. I have a test route planned that will take me all of two miles into Hythe to the catholic church's car park! I will give that a go. What has proved far more difficult is to download the offline maps from the app onto the phone. All the buttons seemed to be greyed o...

I'll be doing this again for the third year in a row. I think that might be the last as next year I am planning a much longer trip away in the motorhome, starting after the last Arsenal home game of the season and going on and on and on..... Another change this year is that I have got away with a lunchtime and a late evening ride previously. This time I have to be at Folkestone Fire Station at 0410 in the morning.  Yes. When all sensible people will be fast asleep.   The leg before mine from Viking Bay near Ramsgate has just been filled as it was vacant. Luckily they haven't had to rejig the entire route to cover it. For me I will need a very early night and Vera Strom will have to stay on the drive as I won't be home from Assen until about 1900 the day before!  That will be a 350+ mile solo ride after I leave my brother and Phil way up in the north of Gelderland! So to help, please think about donating to one of this year's charities! https://relayriders.co.uk/donat...

Planning goes ahead whatever we are doing outside of Motorhoming!!   Once we are back into France on the way back I might be more relaxed and "go with the flow". In Spain I have been checking places to go and that, to me at least, means getting places to stop booked. We have used the Camping-Car Park network of aires a lot over the last two years and this is something that I will continue to do. I am amazed at the number of vloggers. bloggers and forum commenters I see that have paid £50000+  for a van, and many more like £100000, and yet begrudge a decent stop that costs about €14 a night and has EHU and all the waste and fresh water services included. I don't mind the idea of "rough camping" or "wild camping", but it does do my head in when they post about free sites and then they look like a layby or a dried muddy field!  I do like tarmac or gravel to park on!   I am currently awaiting the confirmation from Sandaya at Camping Valencia that the three...

Camden Council has voted through parking charges for motorcycles. They are planning to charge all petrol bikes the same as low emitting car at £150 a year, and charge commuters £600 a year to park. This is outrageous and clear attempt to drive bikers out of London This may not affect you but if we don’t fight charges like everywhere then it will spread! Stopping parking charges in one Council means every Council is less likely to even consider it. This is just the first part of the fight. The next stage will be the final ‘statutory’ consultation - this will be a vital opportunity to force them to make further changes or drop the changes entirely. This will not be a normal consultation, they have to respond to each response individually in writing, if you present evidence they must read it and respond, if you give alternative options they MUST consider them. When this consultation comes out we will send it over to you, please look out for it, we will need everyone to respond to stop the...

It seems a little early but today I had to pay the outstanding balance on the Somers Wood campsite at Meriden.  I had already paid the £20 deposit and so there was the remaining £46 to pay. That was done easily so we are committed to going!!!  ;)

Another update! I have been relying on the MyRouteApp website to plan where to go and this will tie in with the additional Navigation App when I pay for it.  For the simple A to B trips I can still use the Ohrex  as normal. Of course I am hoping that the Navigation part of MyRouteapp will work okay and it is supposed to allow the downloading of maps so that it doesn't need to use the internet to work.  I have a 30gb allowance on my mobile phone but don't want to eat that up with the navigation. At the end of the last update we were in Avila where we are staying for two days in the new aire near to the city walls. I opted for a EHU space and hopefully we can charge everything up. From here we have a decision to make. We will have 12 nights left before we return to the UK via Eurotunnel Le Shuttle at Calais. So which way back? Do we go north of Madrid or south of Madrid? I still like the idea of heading up through Aragon and taking the Somport Tunnel, with m...

We went to Canterbury for a short rip today to go to Marks & Spencer to look at trousers for me, for the upcoming birthday party for Claire's cousin.  It's not until June but we will be barely back from Spain and France and we go in in about three weeks. One of the downsides of a Peugeot/Fiat based van is that there is a known problem with the passenger airbag ECU. This is caused when the engine battery gets too low andthe unit fails.  It seems on the face of it that maybe they need to change the ECU to have a fail voltage lower than 11 volts!  But I guess it's an earner with the unit being anything between £300 and £600 to relace, depending on where you get one. # So I like to make sure that the engine battery is kept topped up. We have a single solar panel on the roof and this charges the leisure battery and also, via a split charger some of the sun's rays trickle charge the engine battery.  So far so good.  Touch wood and other superstitions etc. We decid...

Since the last update I have given up pretty much on looking for raw food for Reggie, and have concentrated on a few more overnight stops and scenic drives around the Basque and Cantabrian mountains. Distances on the map turn out to be far less when transferred into the satnav app and into the Ohrex satnav. One thing I am going to look at is using my phone in conjunction with the Navigation app that comes as an extra to the MyRouteApp that I use, and have for years, on the TomTom for bike trips. The TomTom 410 was also used in the car before we got the Nissan with the built in navigation. I have read that some people have used this app successfully on their Android tablets.  I had already booked two nights at Plays de Regatón on the coast between Bilbao and Santander. This was basically to recover from 30 hours on the ferry from Portsmouth. The plan is to try and locate a Tienda Animal store to see if they have any raw food. I have also found a motorhome parking area that should gi...

Seems we chose right again. Shame it can't work in the US like Three UK  used to do before they started gouging people...

Recently I have devoted far too much time looking for stockists for raw dog food in Spain. Reggie has been on the raw diet for a number of years as he was always having stomach problems with tinned/processed food. I posted on a few FB forums to see if anyone else had solved this problem.  It appears we aren't alone and there were many comments asking for the information. One guy came on, who apparently lives in Spain, to say its available "everywhere".  But didn't elebaorate! Another couple said that they had never found any and resorted to using mince from normal supermarkets mixed with some vegetables. That's what we have done but having specific dog food with the added veg and minerals would be nice. So that's when I embarked on my search of the internet. I found a few "chains" that are something like "Pets At Home" in the UK. A quick email to a few in the Bilbao area resulted in a few replies - all negative. No raw meat for dogs. The on...

The car insurance, Claire's car I might add, is due on the 16th April.  The renewal came through and has gone up around 211%! £511 from £242! No accidents. No convictions. No claims. I assume it's because we are a year older and despite none of the above, the perceived risk has over doubled! So I hit the comparison sites.  The best quote we could get was for a company we have never heard of called Yoga at £343.  Still a huge rise on last year. So the next thing was to try the larger supermarkets. They all have their own "bank" that's managed by one of the big boys (or girls!) in the UK banking sector. Tesco, whom we already have a MasterCard, also came up at £343, just a few pence more than unknown Yoga!  So we went for that. At least we know they are unlikely to go bust or simply disappear. It's still a huge increase over last year but it looks to best option.

What a cesspool of intolerance Twitter has become since #ElonMusk got control...

Such has been the press and media going on about the refusal by EU countries to accept UK passports that were issued pre-Brexit that we decided to renew early.   Effectively I will lose about 8 months off my old one and Claire a little longer. Photos were taken on Tuesday morning at a local camera and electronics shop, Device in Hythe,  and the forms done online. I rushed to the Post Office to send the old ones back with next day delivery. All done in about 90 minutes of hectic activity. What was the rush? For both of us it was to get it turned around before we go to Spain in May.  Both the old ones were sent back in the same envelope with both application codes.  Mine has been turned around in four days and I have it.  It does mean that after many years we have gone back to a blue UK and Northern Ireland passport instead of the maroon EU version. As a non Brexit supporter this hardly matters what colour the cover is. Claire's a little miffed as hers seems ...

Over the last week or so I have been looking through the atlas to check out the roads marked with the green "scenic" lines and the places along it (POI)  to stop and be amazed by the views and the sights/sites. I made a list of a loop through the eastern mountains to the south and south east of the first overnight stop in Laredo. Without stops it worked out (on Google maps) at just under 3 hours.  Today I have been on the laptop and checking some of the roads and POI.   The first two, Pozalagua Cuevas and the nearby Dolomites Museum are closed except for weekends. This is fortunate for us as we leave Laredo on Saturday morning....  The loop will bring us back towards the coast again. I have also looked at some miradors (viewpoints) and waterfalls/cascades. Altogether there are 10 waypoints in the MyRouteApp route. I have planned it here as the latest upgrade allows routes to be created for motorhomes. It would mean using the phone instead of Ohrex. The additional cost can b...

Well. That worked well. To get at the bulbs you have to remove the entire instrument binnacle. Who designed it that way?   So I had a look at a couple of YouTubes and it looked fairly straightforward.  So I thought I'd have a go.... Oh..... But. I decided to try the two allen bolts at either side at the bottom of the unit.  Neither would move. They wouldn't budge. Rather than round the heads off I gave up. Ten minutes in the garage and we are no further along.  Main beam and sidelight work. Dipped beam dead. A quick call to Cheriton Motorcycles and it's booked in on Friday. I did manage to remove the TomTom powered head so that when I take it in they can get easier access. Of course. So desperate to get it done I forgot the car was also in for service on Friday. So we'll need to juggle things around.  Let's see what the professionals can do!