Tuesday, May 3, 2011
April saw a very trying trip. Our second van whom we call Victory, despite a full service before we left, developed problems. The first one was in Ukraine when we noticed fluid coming out underneath the engine. A garage fixed the leaking power steering by replacing a pipe for £6.50! but poor Christine Ball and Anna McNicholl had to drive with no power steering till the next day because of an air lock. We stopped just before Kiev for a short brake only for Victory to not start again. Dr Valeriy drove out from Kiev to tow start it with his car with the loaded trailer attached- 5500 kilos!. Thereafter, every time we needed to start the van we had to unhitch our other van from its trailer drive around and back up to Victory, attach a tow rope, bump start it, untie the rope and re-hitch our trailer, We even had to do this performance to get it off the boat at Dover on our return. A new starter has hopefully fixed the problem by Steve Mott's garage who also checked the expensive pipe and found it to be fine. We also got a speeding ticket but that's enough about that !.
