FOR THE LOVE OF A LAND ROVER
The ongoing saga of my husband's new (an extremely loose term, you will discover as you read on!) Land Rover has been a source of much speculation, disappointment, hilarity (although this may more aptly have been described as hysteria) and misery for all concerned. I have accompanied him on no less than three trips down to Devon to collect the supposedly fixed vehicle, only for two of those trips to result in breakdowns of epic proportions! For those of you brave enough to read on, I will explain...
When I met my husband Dominique in October 2003 he had only just passed his driving test and his first car was a 1952 Series 1 Land Rover which he had to start with a handle. For some reason I thought this very romantic. This did not last. As the months grew colder the shine quickly wore off this novel feature - still, at least I wasn't the one outside with my hair blown sideways and experiencing the first stages of hypothermia whilst trying to coax the thing into life! My husband's mother made me a woolly car blanket for Christmas that year.
Fast forward to 2012, the Series 1 now belongs to Domme's dad and in the interim he has driven no less than 4 bangers, has had 2 vehicles on 'long term loan' and has crashed a hire car into a tree! As you may know if you read my previous article about my Renault 5, I am a girl of simple pleasures who looks after her vehicles and becomes very attached to them. My car Claude has been in the family for over 20 years and is still going strong - so much contrast in our motoring histories!
So after the demise of car number 4 (bought for £300, requiring over £600 of work to pass MOT!), it was decided that the time had come to return to the trusty classic Land Rover. A sound decision we thought, based upon sensible thinking, we thought. No road tax, easy to fix with parts readily available, useful for camping....
The first breakdown occurred in early December last year. The 'landy', having been purchased over 1 month before had been in the garage all this time having a new diesel transit engine installed. It was a beautiful crisp, sunny day and we caught the train from Parkway Station in Bristol to Newton Abbott. We couldn't believe our luck that we had such perfect weather for driving the Land Rover back! Little did we know, our luck was to begin and end with the weather. On this occasion we barely made it out of the village where the garage was and somewhere on the A38 near Buckfastleigh we were struggling to get up to 10mph and black smoke was billowing out from the exhaust. The worst bit from my point of view was the embarrassment. As cars overtook us, honking their horns and flashing their headlights – I wanted to just slide down into the foot-well and disappear. Unfortunately, by this point the smoke had now begun to enter the cab and the foot-well was something of a death trap!
Back at the garage and after much scratching of heads and general mumbling, we were given a courtesy car to drive home in and told it would be another week before we could try picking the landy up again. Just before Christmas we were given the green light to make the journey to Devon again, with assurances that it was all ready to go. Driving down this time in the courtesy car, the weather was less in our favour but we hoped this might bode well for making it home. This time coming back, we got almost as far as Cullompton Services! Progress! Having ground to a complete halt this time, we had to call the AA to rescue us and after 2 hours on the hard shoulder in the twilight with frost slowly forming round us, such a welcome sight was the big yellow van that I almost shed a tear...
Alas, again, the relief was not to last as the AA man noticed once he had relayed us to the Cullompton Services to be met by a recovery vehicle that we were not displaying a tax disc. The landy had been taxed but the disc had not arrived in the post in time for the the pick up. Apparently, if the recovery vehicle driver noticed this he would be obliged to refuse to take us anywhere! So we then had a nerve racking hour or so before we received the call to say that the recovery vehicle had arrived, by which point it was pitch black and bucketing down and thank goodness he loaded landy on to the back of his truck without a quibble! I could have kissed him!
And so we were dumped back at the now closed garage and stranded with no way of getting home. Thankfully, my father-in-law lives close by (this is how we ended up buying a Land Rover and having it fixed up so far from home) and a friend of his offered to lend us his car for a couple of weeks while the landy was once again off the road. Domme, due to the stress, had had a drink or two by this point and so it was left to me to get us home in this alien vehicle. The little Citroen AX was not the fastest car on the motorway that night, nor was it the most glamorous, or shiny (or indeed roadworthy – one headlight was not working!) but just for that one late-night journey home, it was, to us, the best car in the whole wide world.
The 'couple of weeks' loan of this little hero of a car ended up being over three months, and if you are reading this Anthony, we are eternally grateful! Landy meanwhile, having been taken eventually to another garage to be sorted, was finally ready to pick up 4 weeks ago and we managed to get approximately 4 days motoring out of it before a fuel filter and the petrol tank needed replacing (the expression 'Trigger's Broom' springs to mind!). It took 7 hours with a blunt hacksaw to get the bolts from the old tank off but my husband, at last, is smiling, and to me, that makes it all worthwhile!
(Published 14th Aug 2013)
