Hemi Extends His Hospital Stay

Tuesday October 6th
Today we hoped to get Hemi back and continue with our travels. I rang the garage at 9am and arranged to go and pick him up at 10am. It all seemed pretty straightforward. Andy was going to come and pick us up and take us to the garage which is quite a long walk away. Not long after the garage man rang me back to say the throttle cable had snapped as they were backing him out to get him ready for us to pick up! I was almost elated. If it was going to break, what better place to break than in his yard. After all we are in England they speak English, and we have a place to stay. Imagine if this had happened when we were on the continent. And we were not driving on the motorway when this happened. This is the garage we used for both our vehicles when we lived down here and they were always very good with our campervan and old car. So he said he would have to order the parts and they would come on the courier in the afternoon but we would probably need to stay here another night. I said I was sure that would be fine and rang Andy to tell him he didn’t need to come and pick us up to collect Hemi.

So we settled down to read the papers do the email etc and after lunch went for a very long walk down to the beach and along the cliffs. It was so misty we could hardly see the Isle to Wight. We ended up walking home through the New Milton township. It was really enjoyable as we could see all the changes that had happened in the last three years.

Shortly after Andy and Liz arrived home the mechanic phoned again to say he was nearly tearing his hair out. This sounded bad, what else could have gone wrong? Turned out they had been sent the wrong part and it was useless, so they had to source another and it wouldn’t come till Thursday. We assured him that we would be okay in the Hengistbury Road Hotel for a bit longer.

At the moment we are trying to rethink the possibilities for getting to either the Friday or Saturday night Squadronaires concert. Tomorrow we are going to walk to the mechanics and find out what are chances are of getting on the road by Friday otherwise it might be back on the National Express!