Trip Planning

I never realised how hard planning this little 6 month jaunt would be.  And I'm not talking about finding destinations and organising to land and camp at friendly airfields.  Oh no that was the easy work.

It sounds stupid, but one of my major problems has been finding appropriate travel insurance.  Our bikes are by no stretch of the imagination the most expensive bikes out there, but there seems to be a single item limit of £250 for most insurance policies.  And then if it ever comes to claiming, we'll have to prove that we secured them properly.  Quite how I do that when the bike is no longer there is a completely different issue.  CTC the UK cycle club / advocacy group do cycle touring insurance.  But not for long stay.  Hmmmm.

And then there's the connectivity problem.  Computer manufacturers (yes I mean you ACER) seem to make it very difficult to find a choose the netbook to suit your needs.  We would like 3G connectivity & have discovered that there are a few appropriate machines, as long as we look out for the G in the 12 letter& number product code and don't get confused by the complete absence of a mention of it in the description.  Grrr.

Unfortunately although netbooks are designed for travel, I haven't found an easy & satisfying way of getting internet connectivity when travel.  That said I haven't managed it in the UK either, with our O2 dongle working in Norfolk, some of the time at not much slower than the old 56kb modems...

Power supply I think I've got sorted with the Energiser/Xpal 18000 that can charge & discharge at the same time: this means that I probably won't take any other power cables with me & just rely on this as a less messy approach.

Oh and how could I forget the datatag, they haven't replied to my question us to their presence outside the UK - it's nice that UK police check for datatags on recovered bicycles, but will the Danes???  And the main use of datatagging is really to make your object a less desirable object for the thief to steal - as it proves that the good in question is stolen, which leads to their prosecution if found in their possession.  But if the thief has never heard of the system???

Ah the joys!  Can't wait to finally get in the air.

Back in London again

We're about 2 days work (maybe 3) from putting the plane into the paint shop, but.... the paint shop is only ready for us in 2 weeks time.  So we're back in London, letting my fibreglass allergy rash die down, organising the house and relaxing.  Well ok, it feels like I'm constantly putting on loads of washing, but apart from that!

We picked up the Leatherman we ordered on Amazon from the post office today, it's a really neat little tool.  I got the extra bits kit so that we can take it with us everywhere and have the right hex driver for each job on the bike / plane, as well as screwdrivers etc.  I'm also eyeing off the saw blade for bread cutting.  It has a very nice strong steel blade as well & I'm not sure whether we shouldn't grind off the latch mechanism to avoid the possibility of having it confiscated as a 'weapon'.

Tonight we're going to an Argentinian steak house with friends, in what was meant to be a celebration of getting the plane ready for paint, so it's going to be a bit of a pre-celebration, oh well!

Onwards and upwards....

I can't believe how long it is since I last posted.  We've been up and back from London a couple of times, organising things for a friend + family to stay at our flat, and then going down to London to spend some time with them.

As regards the aeroplane I've mainly been working on the doors.  They may not look like much but there's a lot of trimming to fit the door frames (as done by Julian to my wavery blue line), attachment of door hinges, retrimming, adding in the rain gutters, trimming again, then putting in the door seals.  Funny thing is that a seal isn't the really useful bits of rubber that seal, but a less useful more hard piece of rubber onto which the useful bits are stuck.

Julian's been busy working on the wings - cutting holes (tricky as the distance from the outside of the wing and the embedded fuel tank is 5mm, so you want to go easy with those power tools!), putting tubes through and sticking the upwards curving wing tips on etc.  (I shan't get too technical here as frankly it didn't mean much to me until recently!)

Today was a bit of an easy day in a way, a lot of driving around to pick up parts (and drop a few off) and some aimless meandering as we tried to find the really good local butcher.  When we finally did find it Julian almost drove into the middle of what appeared to be their abbatoir - a smallish piece of concrete with a good scattering of what looks like salt and a few remaining tufts of hair.  We got some fantastic skirt steak for a stir fry. This is a really nice cut, that is highly prized in France for making the official 'steak frites', but can be a bit hard to come by  elsewhere.  I also picked up along with bacon a small piece of black pudding to try out for breakfast tomorrow.

We're finally testing our camping gear: after a lot of research I've gone with the Optimus Terra cookset - two pots that fit neatly into a neoprene bag, plus a frypan on top which is also a lid.  The neat thing with this set is that the bag means that you can bring your rice or pasta to the boil, then keep them hot (and cooking) in the neoprene bag whilst you cook the accompaniment in another pot on the stove.  I went the whole hog and got the kettle to match as well, on the theory that it will be a huge luxury to have a non garlic tasting cup of something with breakfast, and since the kettle fits inside the cook set it won't take up any extra space.

Swimming pool blues

I seem to be going through a tough couple of days here in Norfolk.  I arrived at the fitness centre today minus card (I think I left it behind last time I was there) & once the lady at the desk had looked for it & then found me in their system via my name, she said 'oh, you're not wanting to go to the swimming pool!  They've drained it...'  Just my luck.  I hadn't showered since Friday (waaay too long).  So no idea why.  She assured me there was no crack (for non UK people - there was a swimming pool that collapsed on various users in London a couple of years ago), so I figure someone must have died there.  Also not good.

So we went to our next next most local pool, which was hideously awful.  The water tasted funny.  And was cloudy.  There were two lap lanes with only one marker.  (It turns out that the locals need that little bit more room for their laps so use two lanes as one).  Dodgey lighting.  The very worst of English radio music.  The times I feel the desire to listen to dance music are limited, in the pool is not one of them.  And no private showers.  And surrounded by English people who shower in their bathers.  I think it could have been one of Dante's circles.

BTW did I mention that the swimming pool was in March, but it was the 28th of Feb???

Microwave blues

I have a microwave that I love dearly.  It's a Panasonic combination microwave that does the best baked potatoes on its special pre-programmed program in under 13 mins.  Unfortunately yesterday appears to have been its last curry.  I wondered why my dish didn't boil over in 30 mins of microwaving and felt it to be somewhat suspicious.  But today I microwaved our soups (2x = 585mL) & in 9 minutes total no warmth was felt.  RIP wonderful microwave.  You've spared me the cost of taking you to Oz.  And with the number of months it's been my only cooking source I can't really complain.

While Julian's away....

Today Julian went to Gary's to tune something on the engine, so i got half a day to myself to do.... What do I normally do if I've got time to myself?????  So I ended up reading through the instruction booklets to come to the conculsion that there was nothing I could do that didn't involve a) cutting holes Julian had already told me not to do without help or b) filing stuff down (bad for my fibreglass allergy).  So I made a mud cake....

By the end of the day the plane looked like this...

Spiders???

One morning a few weeks back I got up to find little pieces of spider silk over everything, which really freaked me out.  So I checked inside the sleeves, legs and pockets of my overalls before putting them on, shuddered a little while walking through the kitchen area and tried to stay zen about it.  These days I'm really not zen, because I've realised that they're actually short pieces of glass fibre, that are presumably floating around the entire warehouse all the time & generally getting in everything.  Yuck.

Anyway today we did some good work after a slow start.  I started on the wings, Julian did a large amount of putting the rudder hinges on, and tomorrow he and Gary are going to somehow tune the engine before putting it on the plane.  All good.  I had fun screwing little brass fittings into little steel fittings and off again.  The usual.

Backdating and other little tricks

as you will have probably suspected, I've been liberally back-dating my posts in order to have the date match up with the events described.  So this is my first real time post!  (Well now I've corrected the date and time to be English and not Australian I suppose it isn't real time anymore!)  I didn't do much at all today: I was feeling pretty ill. So the boys did a sterling job of fibreglassing the tail of the plane (which took all day) and I managed to drag myself out in time to film Julian doing the last little bits of smoothing the cloth down and then putting the bubble wrap 'tent' over the tail of the plane.  About half an hour later we had a moment of intense concern as the smell of burning epoxy spread out in the warehouse, but luckily this appears to have just been ground off particles that have fallen on the coils of the radiator.  We're slowly accumulating a nasty silt of white dust over just about everything in the warehouse.  I got really worried a couple of weeks ago that we had a spider plague, as there were fine pieces of spider silk over everything, but no it was just fiberglass strands.  If I were to work much more with fiberglass I would get myself something looking a bit like a bee keepers suit to keep the stuff away from me.

Can't believe we're here again already!

After a hectic weekend of catching up with friends, post and work, we're back in Norfolk again.  This time we brought Chris with us.  But forgot to bring Julian's laptop, hence no photos to prove his having been here.  (The software for the time-lapse photography is only on his computer and my web connection is too slow to do anything like download it here).  So after a lot of fussing around, we took the wings out of their crate and rearranged the warehouse a bit, we finally got the tail fin on straight.  Gary came around to check taht we were doing it right.  A big help since we hadn't noticed that the bolts were loose on the jig that we use as a reference to make sure that the tail fin is perperdicular to the roof of the plane so it wasn't measuring correctly.  At all.  Then Chris and Julian spent a lot of the evening flocking both tail parts into place and then screwing them in place.

In the interim I made a duck wing red curry, as I could see that we weren't going to be finished in time to go out to a pub.  I partnered it with a Kuenstler 2003 Spaetlese riesling from the Rheingau in Germany, which was really quite delicious - 8% alcohol and so fruit laden with good acid, very intense.  2003 was a very hot year in Europe, which made for good wines in cooler areas like Germany, but was less favourable for hotter places like Sicily.

Friday morning

A hectic clean and vacuum of the factory unit, placing the last few items needed in London in the car, then a trip to the gym to go for a swim in public hours (7-9am), then home to London via the market so that we could pick up a few pheasants and duck wings.  Ah the joys of rural life!