Frustrating!

The weather at the moment is awful!  There has been so much rain, it's cold, damp and miserable :( .  Having said that, the sun is shining at the moment!  But on the odd occasions when the sun has shined recently, within 30 mins it's pouring again!  We've also been busy in France and, annoyingly, I also have to go to work!

The Harley hasn't been out of the garage for weeks and I need a new rear tyre (or tire as they say in USA, and on the UK Harley websites!).  Talk about expensive!  I'm looking at getting one shipped over from the States - including shipping and exchange rates it still seems to work out much, much cheaper.  However, I have to find out how much it will cost to get it changed.  Knowing the Harley stores, they'll charge a fortune for fitting because they didn't supply it.  I've found a lot of other bike shops will refuse to touch a Harley. We'll have to see.

Busy, Busy, Busy!

Well, we've been back at Razay for a few days now getting ready to open up for our summer season. It seems like we've been here for weeks!  There is always so much to do and it always ends up taking longer than we hoped/expected!  Getting the cottages opened up and cleaned up after the winter is always a mammoth task and there are always unexpected jobs to do, things to mend, etc. It doesn't help when the journey over gets complicated by idiotic "jobsworths" at Eurotunnel, who refused us on the train due to the fact that we supposedly had too much stuff in the back of our van!  How ridiculous!  What on earth does it matter how much we are carrying?  Provided we are not over the legal road weight, the size of the van does not change regardless of how much stuff we carry - crazy!

Anyway, we then had to re-book and come over on the ferry, which cost an extra 4 hours, not to mention additional expense.  And to cap it all, about 2 miles from our destination, we collided with a large deer!  I blame Eurotunnel - if we'd been arriving at the time we should have done, we'd have missed the deer by about 4 hours!  We don't know how the deer came out of it, but our van didn't come off too well!  It's still drivable but we have a stoved-in front end, knackered radiator, and a loose headlight - so that's going to be expensive to sort out.  Ho hum - things are always worse at sea!

On the bright side, the weather's been fantastic (until today!) so most of the mowing is done; the pool is nearly ready, although we still need to get the heater going; and Jilly's doing an amazing job (as usual) in the cottages.  It's always a relief to get to opening weekend - we're looking forward to welcoming 3 new families this year.

And, of course, the start of the season means we are we are well on the way to September - and the start of our Road Trip!!

Test Run

Today we braved the showery weather to take the bike out to try out our new intercom.  And we had a successful test run!  We could talk to each other and we could hear without any problem at all, despite the Vance and Hynes Big Shot exhausts trying their hardest to drown us out!

The only disappointing thing is the mp3 sound - I can just about hear it but it's not brilliant.  Unfortunately, it's not possible to adjust the volume for the mp3, only for the speech and, presumably, the phone.  We still need to work out the phone - I have it paired OK, just when it rang I didn't manage to get to answer.  I think I'm pressing the wrong button, or pressing a button instead of just talking.  Still, we have plenty of time to get used to it.

It does seem a bit weird to be talking to each other!  Jill loves it because she can now tell me to slow down!  I have warned her that if she starts "backseat driving" I do have the ability to switch her off!!!!!

Intercom

After the frustrations of trying to communicate by hand signals on the bike, we decided that we would need to invest in an intercom system for our trip (and all our rides). A flurry of hand signals and finger pointing rarely gets the message across and often leads to us having to stop to find what the other wants or needs! So, we've invested in a Scala Rider Team Set Pro - a Bluetooth system which pairs with a phone and/or GPS and also allows you to listen to an MP3 player as well.

It arrived yesterday and I fitted it to the helmets last night, which was reasonably straight forward. After charging the batteries last night, we were able to try it out this evening.  If anyone had looked through the window this evening they would have thought we were nuts, sitting indoors with helmets on, talking to each other from either end of the room!  However, it seems to work well, so I'm really pleased.  However, we still have to test them over the noise of the bike, which will be interesting as the bike is quite loud.  We shall see at the weekend.....

Practice Pack

My daughter thinks we are bit sad!  When I explained to her that today we were going to practice packing the Harley in readiness for our trip, she thought we were being daft.  "What do you need to do that for?  And why do you need to do it now, when you're not going for 4 months?"

I suppose that's probably a good question!  Well, Jill goes over to France for the summer in 10 days' time and before she gets back to the UK, I will have taken the Harley over to France, so this is probably the last opportunity we had to get together the stuff we want to take and make sure we can fit it all in.

We've taken on board all the advice we've read, for example:

1.  Make 2 piles, one for essential kit and one for desirable kit, then discard all the desirable kit!

2.  Put all your kit and all your money on the bed, then halve the amount of kit and double the amount of money!!

3.  Never pack for more than 1 week.

We pared everything down and kept it light and managed to fit everything in to the 2 saddlebags and a small backpack, so it looks like it was a fairly successful rehearsal.  However, there wasn't a lot of spare space - well, there wasn't any spare space!  We may have to try and pare down a little more if we want to leave some room for the odd souvenir!