Our long and tedious journey home has been made worse by the accompaniment of almost constant rain. As a consequence we did not stop to look at anything, we just kept our heads down and bombed up the motorways selected by SatNav as the quickest way to the Channel Tunnel.

The stop at the tiny and remote aire in Listoretta in Spain turned out to be unnecessarily stressful and also essentially added a day to our journey. In the morning when I switched on Basil’s engine there was a strange “clunk” noise and then nothing. I checked the level of the battery and it was fine. So I tried the engine again and it spluttered into life, running unevenly and, most worrying of all, with what appeared to be large volumes of white smoke coming out of the exhaust.

To prevent, what I thought might be, further damage I switched off Basil and rang Comfort, who provide our breakdown service through the AA. I gave them our co-ordinates and waited, and waited and waited. Eventually a man arrived in his breakdown truck and asked me to switch the engine on and this time Basil started perfectly and he purred away. The breakdown man saw that my fuel was low and suggested, in mime and Spanish, that it might have been dirt in the fuel.

However, I had already spotted that the reservoir for the coolant system was empty. I had checked it before we started our journey so I knew it was, once again, losing water. Anyone who read last year’s blog will remember that losing water became a bit of a theme on that trip, but a garage in the UK has supposedly located that leak and fixed it last summer.

The breakdown man filled the reservoir with water and indicated I follow him, some miles and via a petrol station, to his base. He then put his hand under the exhaust pipe with engine running and smelt his hand. I’ve got no idea what he was trying to discern. But eventually he pointed to part of the engine where I beleive he indicated exhaust gases and coolant run side by side. I think he said there was a hole allowing water to leak into the exhaust. I could stay and he could fix it or he said, if I kept an eye on my water and kept topping it up, it would be OK to get back to the UK.

So for the remainder of the journey we have been stopping every two hours to check, and if necessary top up the water.

The only other incident worth recording is a hail storm, the worst we have experienced in Basil, which, for a short time, threatened to shatter or skylights, but it soon passed.

We are now ensconced in our favourite aire in Gravelines (50.987764, 2.122146), with rain bouncing off poor old Basil’s back, waiting for our 2 pm appointment for Mabel and Melek to be wormed for their pet passport. We then have to move to a local campsite because we are critically low on water (for the motorhome not the engine) and water supply in Gravelines for motorhomes (€2 for 100 litres) wouldn’t accept any of my credit cards yesterday.

We are booked on the Channel Tunnel tomorrow, will overnight on the aire in Calais and then briefly visit Sarah’s sister in Hastings before we head home.

This will be the last post of this trip. I hope we will be able to get away again later in the year, but I suppose that depends on the dreaded Covid-19 and what restrictions are put in place.