Quiet For Ages, Then I Go Off-Topic

All has been quiet on this blog for a while. That’s because we didn’t go back out to France/Spain/Portugal straight after Christmas, as we had planned. Instead, we decided to buy a new motorhome. To make it even more of an adventure, we decided to self-import one from Belgium. To make it yet more of an adventure, Mick fell back into short-term employment the moment we signed up to our purchase, leaving me without any transport*, as Colin was sold and went off to his new home almost the moment I put him up for sale.

Mick soon finished his contract, and our new motorhome (Bertie) was collected at the end of January, but the combination of Mick catching a nasty, long-lasting lurgi, together with a desire to wait in for the post every day whilst we went through the process of getting Bertie UK certified and registered* kept us at home.

I still haven’t got anything to write about that’s relevant to this blog, although having received Bertie’s registration documents today, we will be back out and about next week. However, I do want to record somewhere on t’internet a few things about the process of importing a motorhome, and as I believe this blog (rather than our ‘Travels in Colin Bertie’ blog) is more likely to feature in Google search results, I’m going to put those off-topic posts here too. I can’t believe they will be of any interest to the people who usually read this blog, so apologies for the distraction.

The first post will be all about opening up the instrument panel. Thrilling stuff!

(*I’m not counting public transport as being a particularly viable option in this neck of the woods these days, as I had to cancel a planned outing a couple of weeks ago when I discovered that our public transport network is so joined up that our once-per-hour bus arrives at the train station four minutes after the once-per-hour train has left. The result would have been a three-hour journey to travel 35 miles. I didn’t even look at the viability of the return journey.

** getting a foreign motorhome certified and registered involves the use of registered post, so missing Postie would have incurred a day’s delay, which wouldn’t be ideal given the limited time allowed for the registration process.)