Day 8 – Scenery and no Internet.
It was a wet start to the day and we had been listening to falling rain and the sound of road works all night, the site was next to the motorway – I say night time though it doesn’t actually get dark here anymore. After a hot shower and a most refreshing cup of tea supplied by Jeff, we set off towards Rokland. The weather was dull and wet and within a few miles Ivan ground to a halt. Upon inspection his rotar arm had shorted out and needed replacing. Geoff set to work upon his car and a fresh rotar arm and a bump start later and we were off again.
Todays journey took us through some of the most amazing scenery you can imagine with snow capped mountains and large blue lakes with idylic houses potted about here and there. The roads however were dreadful in places and definately not designed for 3-wheelers with large ruts in the centre that would capture your wheel and try and steer you off the road.
Just before dinner we lost Ivan through some road works though thankfully we soon found him again. Whilst we waited, as we were in a built up area, I fired up the laptop and tried to connect to an unsecured network so that I could post the latest update but even though I connected, I couldn’t get on the Internet. Our “3” broadband modem doesn’t seem to work anymore, we don’t know if we have exceded some sort of limit or if it is just completely useless. We had only used it for 2 nights to update the blog and send 2 emails and it reported a bill of £32 for Internet services then. The crazy thing is that when it did connect the connection was so poor it would have been faster to post a letter. So … we think 3 is completely usless.
Back on the road, as we got further North the weather was starting to pick up and after a short session of hail falling on the screen the sun came out and stayed out. The scenery seemed to just get better and better as we drove along and the roads got worse. It didn’t deter other road users though and Artic lorries came charging down the roads at frightning speeds and at one point we saw one crashed at the side if the road, his cab had gone one side and his trailer was on the other. There are skid marks everywhere.
About 7:45pm we passed a camp site next to a lake with snow capped mountains set around it. So we pulled in and set up camp there and even had time to go for a short walk. We checked the laptop once more to see if we could connect to the Internet by some means. Alas not. We shall have to post all the updates when we next get a connection.
Elvis