We were away for the weekend, at Emma’s mam’s. Emma is getting her bridesmaid dress all fixed and fitted up for Katy’s wedding in July. We came home on Sunday evening, ensuring we’d left the Bank Holiday Monday free for a full day spent together as a family.
It wasn’t til bedtime that we’d realised that we’d need to go grocery shopping. The idea of wandering around Morrisons on a Bank Holiday didn’t really appeal, so I reckoned that we could get with the rest of the 21st century and order our shopping online. We’ve done this a few times before, but for some reason the habit never sticks.
By the time we’d got a list together, and found all the items on Tesco’s site, it was nearly half one in the morning. To my amazement, the site offered us a delivery slot between 2 and 4pm that afternoon! The same day! On a bank holiday! Madness.
And, just after 2pm, as promised, the Tescos van drew up with our shopping. That’s pretty damned impressive. Obviously, Tescos has a ready-made logistics and distribution network (eg. its stores all around the country) which makes this feat somewhat easier to manage than a traditional online business, but wouldn’t it be lovely if all big retailers could manage this?
So, it’s been a couple of weeks with the bargain basement 306, and I’ve spent enough time with it to find its faults – we’ll see how much more falls off in the coming weeks.
The radiator seems to have a leak. I’ve had to top the beast up with water a couple of times in the last three weeks. A red light flickers on the dashboard when the water level drops below a certain level in the system. Topping this up seems to cure the light for a week or so. I read on t’interweb that 306′s have a tendancy to eat radiators, and with age and mileage, they tend to leak at the bottom of the radiator. From a quick inspection this seems to be where my water is leaking from.
I can find a replacement radiator off eBay for about 40 quid, and I think i could make a reasonable crack at fitting it myself – the DTurbo is a purely mechanical beast, no crazy engine electrics or anything, but this car is supposed to be ‘zero maintenance’ for me, so I’m tempted to just chuck a can of Radweld in the rad and see how it goes…
Another blog hiatus – good reasons this time, though!
One, holiday. We went to Lanzarote for a week in April – blummin’ lovely. The weather was nice and toasty all week – topping out at a positively sticky 38.5C! Really very hot – especially for Aimee, who point-blank refused all week to wear her sun hat. She only accepted the sunglasses too towards the end of the holiday, and even then only because we’d managed to convince her that they were ‘cool shades’, with us demonstrating to her multiple times that mummy and daddy wore them, so she should too!
Never been to Lanzarote before – been several times to Tenerife, another Canary Island, but never to Lanzarote. It’s often been said of Tenerife that “it’ll be nice…when it’s finished” – a nod to Tenerife’s non-stop redevelopment, with more building sites and construction cranes than actual holiday resorts, and that downtown Playa Las Americas is a bit of a haven for lager louts and clubbers – and this is true, but there’s also some very nice parts of the island and the year-round summer climate is certainly welcome.
So, when we touched down in Arrecife on Lanzarote, I was braced for more of the same. As it turns out, I was quite wrong.