Dora needs some loving

Generally Dora has been pretty good. She has given us some headaches and stress, but nothing really major. Was this about to change?

For a start, her environmental system started playing up again. Recap; she has a Pirelli Feelpure system which takes all the nasty deposits out of the diesel instead of ejecting them into the atmosphere. All very noble, especially if you want o drive into low emission zones, like London. We don’t. Is it worth it?, we remain neutral on that one.

The LED started again, this time red flashing. It is usually a nice continuous green. We have had red and green flashing, when she was thirsty and wanted some of her special oil. This was different. Red flashing seems more serious, and a bit more urgent. The next time we got in front of the internet we downloaded the full instruction manual (Yes I thought we already had it too, but we didn’t).

A relief, big sighs all round, all she needed was a bit of regeneration. All very Doctor Who. Apparently, how the system works is to trap the nasty particulates in a filter near the exhaust. These particles are then burnt. You need a high temperature to do this, and maybe with the small journeys  on the Algarve this hasn’t happened so soot had built up. We had to run her engine, get it hot then hold down a button until she went green flashing and shortly afterwards solid green. And it worked. Happy days.

That was until the next day…back to red flashing. We tried the whole regeneration thing to no avail.

A few emails to Pirelli and our friend David Butler, who supplied her special oil.

Thankfully they got back to us really quickly with even fuller instruction and once followed all back to normal….Fingers crossed, touch wood and all that superstitious claptrap.

All was well, we had had a nice climb of Foia and had anticipated doing the adjacent mountain, Picota. The weather outlook was good. We headed off and within five minutes it started to rain. Neither of us had bought out gortex jackets, so we headed back to Dora for shelter and abandoned the walk. The forecast was really wrong. Dark grey clouds everywhere, scuttling across the skies. What to do? It was still early, but neither of us felt like traipsing around in this weather. A day in Dora would be OK but only if we could find electricity and Wi-Fi access. As luck would have it ten minutes down the road and a motorhome site with all our needs, including a swimming pool, which we never actually found.

We headed off towards the site. We soon found a wide but bumpy unpaved track. At the gate, I jumped out to pay and get the Wi-fi password. I signalled to Susana to drive into one of the empty spaces. Nothing, she just sat there. When I approached, nothing was working on Dora at all, engine battery wise. Luckily a slight incline allowed us to coast gently into our space, even then the owner gave us a bit of grief for not being quite symmetrical. We plugged her into the mains, perhaps this would recharge her batteries.

While we waited we wrote a few posts and then, as the weather had cleared a little, decided to try a made up walk. It was quite remote, but lots of tracks, undulating hills and a nice little peak in the distance. It looked promising. At least in this situation we wouldn’t be able to blame Julie Statham and the Algarve Walking book for getting lost.

The tracks were easy to follow and soon we had reached a paved road and a small village. Our summit had quickly got closer. We traipsed around a bit, looking for roads that would get us higher up the hill. The buildings were thinning out, until eventually we passed a building site where three new homes were under construction. Beyond  lay woods. We headed up steeply, trying to find our own paths.

The vegetation got thicker and thicker. It was quite slow going, but the cork oaks were numbered so people must come up here occasionally.

Then the trees thinned out as large slabs of rock prevented them taking hold. This was more tricky to scramble over, but we continued to head up, eventually getting to a ridge.

We never did quite get to the summit. It was getting late on in the day, and we didn’t want to get caught out. We also had to renegotiate all that shrubbery, and would we every find the same path back!

Obviously we did and before long we were back amongst the houses. Just the track back to Dora.

But as we set off the heavens opened, yet again we didn’t have our waterproofs, so we had to take what shelter we could under Susu’s down jacket

And as they say, every cloud has a silver lining, actually in this case a really beautiful rainbow.

Really big.

And then another one appeared, two rainbows.

A bit bedraggled, we got back to Dora.

And had the battery recharged.

NO.

As part of our motor insurance with safeguard we have European roadside assistance. That evening we tried out Skype for the first time, and got through. They were brilliant, we didn’t need rescuing tonight, tomorrow would be fine. Within ten minutes all details had been taken and we would have a mechanic with us between eight and nine the next day. The Skype call hadn’t cost us a penny, but would we be shelling out on a new battery or alternator in the morning?

He arrived on time, and within minutes had diagnosed the problem, a loose cable. The battery was fine. Dora was soon back to her happy self, the connector properly tightened. That unpaved road had jiggled her cables loose. No real drama, maybe time to buy a cheap multimeter, I saw one in Lidl just the other day.

Thankfully we had safeguard, they were brilliant. www.safeguard .com

GDR