On the Road Again!

The first post of the trip. Start mileage. We filled the diesel last weekend before the prices shot up this week. It's crazy that locally diesel is today £2.019 a litre. It was £1.959 on Sunday.  I stuck the magneic UK plate on the back doors along with the Remembrance plates. Whilst we are away i expect we'll visit some D-Day sites.

It's been a frustrating time.  I can't ever put them in my ears in the morning and expect them not to fail  Today the left managed less than an hour before it gave up. Before that the battery level was 80%. The right, which by some miracle also connected to the app showed 80%. I thought I'd try again at 5.05pm. Nothing. The right gives three peeps on the battery check. Neither will connect to the app.

Once i had committed us to a longer trip away to the far south of Spain in February and March, went to see if I could find the channel crossing fares. Another Motorhome Fun member posted that discounted fares for over-60's were available on the DFDS sailing from Newhaven to Dieppe. Previously you had to call 📞  to get it. I checked and got a single fare of £85 for the van and two people. Once i found the right page (!) that automatically takes off the 20% discount, the fare comes down to £72.20 each way! So I booked it. So far I have just paid the deposit with another payment in late January.

So was my medical treatment in the hospital free as we thought on the day when I was didchrged? Was it covered by the GHIC? NO! The GHIC covered the time put in by the doctors and nurses. But not the MRI and blood tests.  I got a bill for what works out at £215! Was it covered by travel insurance? YES & NO! It was covered but with the excess and exclusions if I had claimed I would have only managed to recoup around £25. It wasn't worth it. Check before you go to a French hospital for treatment. 

For some reason this page was misplaced and I have found it again but only with photos on Flickr. The text was all chewed up. The Marbella Arch (Taken in 2003!) Claire in the Parque de la Alameda Sardines for lunch?

All these photos were taken in October 2010 when we were away on holiday in Andalucia.  They were all taken on my Canon EOS 300D. A camera that was cheap from eBay.  It served very well for over three years. I started a Flickr account just for these photos for the "pueblos blancos" with the idea of updating each time we visited one or a new one. Over the years I have forgotten the Flickr password to login and Yahoo have deleted the email account I had to use, so I can't click "forgotten password". I filled in a form on Flickr to explain and let's see what happens.  There must be loads of photo accounts that have no connection to their owner. Instead I had to download a zip file of all 35 photos and save on my laptop.   We return to Andalucía in 2027, and so we might get a chance to add to the photos of these spectacular villages.  And who knows, Flickr might get me access to the Grand Tourer account.

The actual trip to the National Memorial Arboretum is on the November 1st. There's a meet up with the Camper Club bright and early on the Sunday morning.   Then we go in convoy to the NMA.  We have all day to visit the various monuments.  I will have some British Legion crosses with us to place on the memorials to where various Devall and O'Leary veterans will be honoured. William Devall - https://invictamoto.blogspot.com/2020/07/william-devall-rip.html The Motorhome Fun Journal for this trip is here -  Camper Club - The Great Remembrance Convoy

I was reviewing the trip to Norfolk for Luminate as I was looking at trying to see if I could squeeze in  timeshare trip before this year's "bank" with RCI expires. We booked the Monday visit as we could take the dog. Anyway, all the updates can be viewed on the new Journal. I am looking at stopping somewhere on the Sunday.  Perhaps we can fit in a pre-Christmas trip to Claire's sister to deliver the Christmas presents.   I'm thinking maybe the Waterpump CL or the Sibton White Horse. Both CL's we have stayed at before and really like.  Motorhome Fun Journal for Luminate

Since we decided to have an earlier holiday in Europe, mostly to avoid as much of the expected heatwaves that plagued Europe this year.  The infrastructure isn't geared up for 35°C plus temperatures for weeks on end, not here and not in Europe either.   We booked the Picos and Pyrenees in June because the mountains are cooler.  Instead, the daily temperatures were hovering around that 35° mark all day and one day touched 41°C in one place. So rather than "suffer" that we have returned to what we used to do, a timeshare trip in February around Claire's birthday.  I spent a few hours looking for campsites.  It's very popular with "snow birds" from Northern Europe who stay for months at a time. Prices were also quite high! I found a couple that appealed until I saw the price for a week's stay. So I decided to see what RCI ( https://www.rci.com/ ) could offer. Although I s...

Unfortunately, my charity walking came to an abrupt halt due to a foot injury. Some years ago on Florida I had a similar probkem that we suspected as gout. A treatment of turmeric capsules cleared that in a couple of days. This time the problem was in the left foot. The big toe joint was painful and could be "clicked" back into place. A bit like cracking finger joints. Turmeric hasn't fixed it. The docs gave me a short course of drugs that reduced the swelling and took the heat out. But still painful to walk. Another trip to the docs and I am on a short course of steroids. Four Prednisolone 5mg tablets a day taken at once. Hopefully the last week of the charity event will be better and I can get somewhere near the goal.

These are so frustrating.  If they both connect to the smartphone app at the same or roughly the same time then it seems a miracle has been performed.  Last evening the left one stopped working. Dead as a dodo. I took them out.   Only a short time previously I had checked the app to change the program to TV from Universal.  This changes the way they process sound. The battery indicators were showing 90%. This morning they came on together, batteries still 90%. Connected to the app. Glory days. A trip out to Aldi before a quick stop at Age UK. If you have NHS supplied aids, you can get spare batteries from Age UK. The lady there has similar problems.  She gave me two packs of eight 312 sized batteries as we are away for three weeks soon. I had looked on Amazon. They sell for about £8 for a 12 pack. By the time I got home, the left aid had stopped working again. Because the right ear is so bad, the aid Bluetooths to the left. Then it tricks the brain into thi...