“When you argue with reality, you will lose — but only 100 percent of the time.”
Bad weather reached us this month. From our side, other than trying to follow the sun, we can just enjoy what was given, nothing else to do. 💪
🏜 Muddy Rain
On our first days in Granada, we got a particular type of rain. Sand storms, known as “Saharan Air Layer”, made the Sahara dust arrive in Spain and with the rain it became muddy.
The day started like this:
And soon “Marmita” was like this:
After that we got 2 weeks with almost no sun.
☀️ But we love (need) the sun!
Indeed! The sun is our main source of energy and on a good sunny day, we manage to charge our batteries, power our work office and use all the energy we need to keep “Marmita” operational.
So what if there is no sun? With no sun, we manage to stay for 2 days tops.
Luckily (or well planned) we have a generator that is powered by gasoline for situations like this, it is not the cleanest energy, but given the situation, it worked perfectly. With 5L of gasoline, we managed to go through the 2 dark weeks without any major problems.
🚗 The Route
The route was a bit messy this month, going up and down, trying to find good weather along the way. We didn’t really succeed but we tried anyway 🤷♂
🔨 Maintenance Time
We left Milan with a “broken” water pump, soon after we realized that it was not completely broken, big smile and a breath of relief 🙌.
RV’s water pump has a pressure sensor that will activate the pump when there is water flow, in our case this sensor was broken but the pump was still working properly with manual activation.
In the beginning, it was not that bad. Just a small inconvenience. We have even created a “code” to handle the situation, for a shower, for example, knocking twice on the bathroom wood wall means — switch on/off🙈
But after a while it got annoying.
Luckily (again) we had a spare pump. However, the problem was:
- Lack of tools to remove the broken pump;
- A place to do the repairing, as we would need to empty and load the water tank a few times.
We ordered the tools on amazon, and this month, after 3 months we finally managed to change the pump.
*Unload water, change the pump, load, test, find out that it’s leaking, unload, buy “veda-rosca” (EN thread sealing PTFE tape / SP Teflon), fix it, load once again, test, uhuuu!
The Good
- We were prepared for the period without sun
- The water pump is working again
The Bad
- If you think that rain is bad, it can be worse — Muddy rain
- We bought the tools to change the pump and removing it was easy. Unfortunately, we then needed another tool to remove the pipe that we didn’t have. Fortunately, I managed to borrow it.
What did we learn?
- My father-in-law always says “We always have to have the right tool for the right job”, we must have all sorts of tools for “Marmita”, otherwise, you might get all your work impeached by a stupid thing.
What is next?
After a month of ‘delay’, we finally reached Portugal. So we will spend some time around.
Ciao 👋
