Saturday and Sunday the weather has been 'Scorchio' .... Sunday morning on the SV, I left the campsite and went to "The Owl's Nest" for a late breakfast. Cheeseburger and salad Hmmm! and two cups of tea in the blistering sun. The only shade was under my crash helmet so I set off for a ride around, Builth Wells, Aberystwyth, for ice cream, Cardigan and back to camp. 178 miles if the speedo trip is right. The severely hard saddle informed my rear end of every yard. The roads surfaces were mostly very good and in the few areas where the top surface is stripping off there were adequate road signs warning of a 'temporary surface'. Still many times better than the roads around my home area. The roads were mostly empty and I managed to get a good 'wriggle on' without scaring myself too much. It is a 'fun bike' with capable handling but it does need a suspension upgrade if it's going to be 'pushed'.
The purpose of the trip was to check that I can load/unload the bike on/off the trailer and that the car can pull the trailer and to better understand what my needs are to fit out the car as a 'sleeper'. No sink or cooker, TV or heater this is a metal tent and not a camper van.
On the way to camp the dreaded "ENGINE FAILURE" message appeared on the dash and the car went into limp mode. 40MPH up hill at best and 55 MPH on the flat. Having just spent £1700 on a tow bar, full service and replacement DP filter I was somewhat "cheesed off". I called the garage that had undertaken the work. They were concerned but could not do much from 350 miles away. Fat Rat advised I call the breakdown folk and get them to plug in their 'gizmo' to determine the fault from the error code."'DP filter blocked and 'regeneration' not available". The fault message was cleared but came back within ten seconds of starting the engine. So the plan for Sunday was that I would leave my bike and trailer and try to limp home and get to the local garage. I set off about 8pm and crawled up the hill from the campsite. I managed reasonable progress to the A40 until the first hill when I had to 'floor it' in third to get 45MPH @ 3500 RPM. At the top of the hill I managed to get it fourth gear and 3500 rpm, which it had not done on it's previous journey down. Then the car picked up and behaved normally in fact It ran at 70MPH all the way home despite the check engine warning light the Engine Failure message on the dash. It's got to the garage this morning and if it shows off again I'm afraid it's going to get the "John Cleese" (I'm going to give you a good thrashing) treatment.