Journey No 1 – 7th to 8th & 30th November 2009
7th November 2009
Liz Evans and Douglas Locke collected Harrie from Preston and drove home to Carrick Castle, Scotland stopping at Beattock on the way up.
Liz & Douglas spent their first night in Harrie in a lay by on the A74 at Beattock, an exceptionally quiet road at night although you could hear the traffic on the M74 motorway below the other side of the road. It was wet and dark when he parked up leaving the Peugeot 406 estate in front of Harrie, as we had to take the car down to Preston to collect Harrie. We cooked our first dinner, checked e-mails n Douglas’s computer and went to bed. We both slept very well on the very comfortable bed that drops down over the driving area.
8th November 2009
In the morning we took a photo of Harrie before setting off for home with Liz at the wheel – her first drive in Harrie as Douglas had done the drive up from Preston. On taking a break during the morning before Douglas took over driving Harrie, we both commented that we noticed the clutch had been slipping which was rather frustrating and decided to have the van looked at by our garage on our return home.
En route home we called in to see Calum, Liz’s son, at Strathclyde University to show him Harrie. Then we did some shopping before fuelling up in Glasgow. After Liz took over the driving from Clydebank, she found the clutch was slipping a lot more and had difficulty getting up the hill out of Clydebank, so asked Douglas to take over the driving to home. Douglas noticed the clutch was very much worse than it had been and when almost at the top of the Rest and Be Thankful on the A83 the clutch would no longer engage after starting off at the temporary traffic lights. Very fortunately a passing motorist towed Harrie up the last part of the hill into the car park where we called the breakdown service. 2 1/2 hours later Harrie was towed to our garage, MacKellar & Paterson in Strachur for repair and we went home in the car to Carrick Castle – not how we had expected to arrive home – without Harrie…
30th November 2009
On return from our holiday in Lanzarote & Fuerteventura for a couple of weeks we collected Harrie from the garage. The repairs included a new clutch, front brakepads, headlightbulb and a winter service at a total cost of £901.78 – quite a shock.
We drove Harrie home and recorded a start mileage in Preston as 110,623 km and a final mileage at home as 111,069 km, totalling 446 km for the journey (279 miles). The fuel consumption for the trip had been 23.3 mpg.
