And as for me, I've been doing what I do best, spending money on new toys and installing them. The big ticket items lately have been a new computer (one that's big enough for me to actually be able to see) and a new solar panel to try and give us enough battery power to run everything without having to run the motor to charge the batteries too often.
The computer is great (I think it's the same as the one Rick bought when we were in Brisbane earlier this year) but Windows Vista gives me gas. It's all very nice with lots of flashing lights and clever gimics but seems slower than XP, uses more memory than you can shake a stick at and seems to have lots of little glitches in it. eg when you close a window in Internet Explorer it tells you IE has stopped working and Windows is checking to find out why. I know why for God's sake, I closed the bloody thing! Apart from that it plays a mean game of Solitaire with very fancy graphics.
We've only got one more important job to do now. We were filling the water tanks the other night, they hold about 600 litres and take an hour or so to fill. We were watching TV and having a few drinks and after a couple of hours Doreen asked if it always took so long to fill them. My response was yes or something similar and we carried on watching TV. After about another hour I thought my feet were getting a bit cold and looked down to see water round them. The long and the short of it was that the top of one of the tanks had split and the water was gradually filling up the boat. It certainly got our attention and put paid to the TV and drinks. I don't think it will be a particularly big job to fix it though and hopefully we'll get it done tomorrow and then on Friday or Saturday, weather permitting we will finally be off on the trip north.
Watch this space for further updates.
P.S Happy 50th birthday to David.
