Preparing for the off

The time to think about leaving our winter home was upon us once more. The first part of that involves putting the car into store for the summer, so we headed back to Hythe and then dropped our car into the rather excellent storage place we have used before in the New Forest. A few social things, then we collected a rental car from Southampton airport (a painful process) to get us back to the Cardiff area. Naturally we had to say bye to Izzy who had grown back her nose fur rather well we think since we last took her to the groomer:

Southampton cannot be classed as a busy airport but it has about 4 car hire companies there. We had booked with Budget, the cheapo version of Avis. The only queue was at the Avis / Budget desk, the rest were empty. Then the woman ahead of us hadn't got the DVLA check code that you need (and get reminded about three times before collection through emails and SMS messages). She kept saying "as I only have the car for one day and we are already late can't I just take it?"

The rather typically South African lady "serving" her was unimpressed and closer to curt than you would expect from someone who is supposed to be the customer face of the company. No idea why they employ her as we were all "processed" rather than served. However I finally got some keys with the comment that I had been upgraded to a VW Golf. Oh yes, clearly the car they wanted to get rid of through the one way rental. 18K miles on it and the rather unhelpful lady told me that there were only three areas of minor paint damage. When I commented that I could not believe any rental car with that amount of use only had three scratches and no alloy wheel damage, I got the cold stare.

In the Avis bit of the car park I boldly walked up to bay 45 as marked on the paperwork. Sure enough, a Golf sat there but with a guy in it who started it up, adjusted the mirrors and drove off. Walking round the car park looking for the Golf with lights that flashed as I prodded the key was amusing. Around 10 minutes were spent photographing the various bits of damage on the battle-scarred car before departure.  Such a different experience to the Avis site in Cardiff which has always been great - indeed they were at handback this time too.

Being carless, the Bromptons were called into action as shopping trolleys with the big bags attached:

Somehow the heavy stuff seemed to end up in the bag attached to the captain's bike (think this is in his imagination - the Crew), not that it matters much with some battery help. With an unending weather forecast of rain and wind, we amused ourselves in several ways. One was meeting up with Simon and Nikki - a good excuse to see the delectable Moxie again over a Cadwalladers bacon sandwich (they really are very very good!) :

Some walks, some cycle trips, some pottering about doing bits and bobs on the boat and still the forecast was grim:

Finally we saw a weather window coming - escape looked possible. After a lunchtime filling up on Japanese food at Volcano  (rather good Japanese restaurant in Cardiff Bay which reminded the captain of his work visits to Tokyo) courtesy of Lorna, we gave the boat an "is it all still working" run out:

The usual plodding around the bay followed and fortunately, everything did seem to still be working. We  had also finished the hull polishing between rainy spells and scrubbed the winter gunge off the waterline area. Salt water would soon get rid of it anyway but there was enough to cause some drag and hence extra fuel burn. At current prices, that is not too smart.

Finally, we felt ready to go. The only downside was that tide times forced a 4am lock out from the bay. Setting the alarm clock for the first time in ages was not nice.