Nettle’s birthday

We’re terrible with this date stuff — it just occurred to me to check, and we’ve lived in Nettle for a year, a week, and four days now. Happy birthday, Nettle!

It’s interesting reading through the first blog entry after we got Nettle — particularly, the comparatively low cost of fuel (we pay $25 AUD per 100kms now, as opposed to $20 then), and our wildly optimistic assumptions about using laptops on our leisure battery!

We’ve come a really long way, and learned heaps about living in a motorhome. With the various minor hiccups we’ve encountered along the way, I feel like I’m getting familiar with many of Nettle’s different systems and feel increasingly confident about DIY-ism. The originally dreaded task of emptying the cassette is now effortless, and something I do without thinking now. We (or rather, I) also learned very quickly at the beginning about how to remain calm in the face of navigation hiccups — put aside the anxiety and just go with it!

Speaking of navigation hiccups and driving anxiety, I have to say, I’ve also become a dramatically better large-vehicle driver. After some insanely tiny tiny Italian streets, we’re rather calm about tight spaces now, and find ourselves chuckling about the “wussy” English drivers slowing to a crawl to pass us on laneways when I probably would’ve just happily barrelled through.

As we were discussing just the other day, it’s amazing how much Nettle’s just become our home. We were originally envisioning renting for a while, maybe over winter, to get a break from the tight living quarters — aside from rent-free house-sitting, now we wouldn’t dream of it! She’s our home, and what’s more, she’s homely! We love her dearly.

So, thanks for looking after us for a year, Nettle!

Settling in again

It would’ve surprised us a few weeks ago, but we’re settled down back in Cornwall! After heading up to visit Sarah, Carmen and Diane, we were originally planning to find somewhere in the area to stop for a bit longer, to finish off our current project. We found no feasible sites that fulfilled our needs though, and the least-worst option was actually more expensive over a month or two than driving back to Cornwall!

So, we set off from Bath to do the four-or-so hour drive back “home”, stopping via a hardware store where (we think) we successfully solved our bed-condensation issue, with a couple of cheap camping mats!

About half-way there, just before Plymouth, my iPhone’s GPS was behaving a bit oddly, as happens from time to time lately, so I rebooted it, and it never came back to life! As it’s our navigation system, I pulled over by the road, pulled out the laptop and tried to coax it back to life, with no success. As a last resort I pulled out my old iPhone, which I keep around for testing, and fired it up, to find its GPS wasn’t working any more! Eek!

Katherine was, in the meantime, rather calm about all this, and in the end her suggested approach — slumming it along with everyone else and following road signs — panned out. Who knew?

So we pulled up in now-familiar Threemilestone, Truro and got down to the rather lengthy business of catching up on our blog and photo-processing.

There was a happy ending to the iPhone hiccup too — I discovered Apple’s online service request facility, ordered a repair, and a box arrived the following day for me to post the sick iPhone off in; two days later, I had a brand new iPhone arrive at the door! Impressive customer service, there.

And now, back to programming!