(Uploaded 20/6/2008 - Written 13/06/2008)
Looking back it’s hard to believe I forgot today was the 13th and a friday. Normally I’m not superstitious but today might just change that.
Nokia Maps
Firstly, as I promised, an update on the Nokia Maps application. Surprisingly it’s pretty good as a navigation aid with one caveat: Although the N95 does hold the GPS signal quite well, when it does drop the phone has a disturbing habit of telling you’re not on a road and that you need to make a u-turn. After a few seconds the phone pulls itself together again and decides that, no, you haven’t lost your mind or joined a rally team and, yes, you can be trusted to continue on your present route.
Otherwise, not bad - definitely usable especially if you have a holder that allows you to keep the phone fairly high on the dash so that it can keep a good view of the satellites. The cup holders in my 2002 Golf seem to work well.... the complete lack of anywhere to hold it in the courtesy 1999 Renault laguna doesn’t work so well..... why the courtesy car... ahh.. read on.
Holiday, celebrate?
We where roughly half way from Poole to our caravan park in Devon when the temperature gauge veered alarmingly from 90 C toward 130 C and then triggered the “STOP! YOUR CAR IS ABOUT TO EXPLODE” message (or at least words to that extent).
Mildly disturbed (especially since the car was serviced only two weeks ago) I checked the state of the mysterious noisy lump that lives under the bonnet but the few sections of the engine that I can understand seemed fine as did the radiator and oil levels.
Since we had taken out the “super, no worries, all problems covered” policy offered to cover guests on the way to the park we thought at least our recovery to the park would be covered. Well, no.
After a few calls we found that, actually, the policy covers reimbursement of expenses in the case of breakdowns but won’t actually move you an inch. Thus came a few calls to the RAC (who have a very helpful bunch of operators - even going as far to keep in touch to let us know when someone would be out) in conjunction with an extremely nice bunch at a hotel (who put up with us being broken down, filling up fluids and hanging around in their car park) - the guys that RAC sent on to us couldn’t have helped more.
Diagnosing a broken water pump (ouch) we expected our week break to be over pending an expensive repair and a recovery home. Well, the repair will probably still be expensive but they did bring out a courtesy car before they took away our car.
After transporting the contents of the car over (no mean feat when you have enough packed contents to entertain a 3 year old boy on and off the beach) and installing the car seat, the first thing that I noted (apart from the fact I’d gone from driving a GTI 1.8T Golf to an aging non-turbo Diesel Laguna) was that I had almost no diesel and still had 76 miles to go.
No problem, I thought. The chap who had low-loaded my car away had told me where I could get fuel so (slightly grumpy by now) we pulled in to the station to fill up (or at current prices to put in a drop of fuel at least) only to find rows of “no diesel” stickers on the pumps. Yes, panic buying had emptied out most of the garages in the area.
Returning to the car (complete with a - by now - overtired and hyperactive 3 year old) we pushed on to see if we could find another station. Luckily we found one and, after another hour or two, arrived at the park.
A total of 196 miles and 9 hours after we left we had finally arrived. On the whole a less than stellar start to the break. Let’s hope things improve...
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