Hello everyone,
I kinda got out of the habit with the blogging since I got back on shore ! Don’t worry, the cruise posts will start up again next time, I just need to talk about some after cruise stuff … and maybe get back to a little cruisey summary too for some good vibes at the end.
This is skipping ahead a little bit with cruise stuff but the not too spoilery summary is : storms happened ! They were looking pretty serious, so our return was delayed a day with that day being spent sheltering in a fjord. More on that in a future post. But it did mean that instead of me returning on Saturday and having a sleep day on the Sunday, we got back on Sunday and then I was up the road again for a car service on Monday before restarting work on Tuesday.
I’ll be either for a bit of quiet over the coming weekend.
The car service is drawing a bit of a rant actually … It could well be Strike 3 for the Lexus organisation. They make wonderful cars but I’ve had them delivered with pre-delivery defects that in two cases, should have been picked up in the 150 point pre delivery quality and safety inspections they talk about for the used cars.
The least bad one was the IS with the battery terminal that popped off leaving me with a dead car incident. I think this would have happened as a consequence of the cars probably being shipped (by ship) with the batteries disconnected … and then all the predelivery configuration gets done and the battery’s connected. It was just bad luck that it wasn’t tightened up enough, but also careless.
The serious one was my last car, I think it was shipped with a fault in the back suspension which led to massive understeer and excessive body roll. This would have been picked up in a test drive and it would have been a factory defect. It also wasn’t picked up in two services.
And I got a £700 service bill for my latest car. The extra cost was for wheel alignment and a new tyre because the old one had excessive wear due to the poor wheel alignment. Red’s a 68 plate car, which means it was registered in the second half of 2018. When a UK car is 3 years old, it has to start having annual road worthiness checks, which is how stuff like bald tyres and faulty wheel alignment get discovered.
So when it comes to having a car delivered 3 months after one of these checks, with faults like that … you could call me rather ticked off about it. I don’t think it was anything I’d done post delivery, I can’t remember whacking anything. (Although I had another bout of covid not long after getting the car) Especially as it had the wobble vibration kicking in between 35 and 50mph which is indicative of either alignment or balancing. (Or a faulty wheel bearing)
Yeah, I’m decidedly unhappy about it. But it’s not something to immediately change the car about, like what it was with the Blue car with suspected suspension fault and the Silver one which had a power steering fault which was also skipped over in a service. My impression of both those was pretty much “Ok, you’re not finding and discovering these obvious faults, so I’m not going to tell you about them as part of the negotiations for me changing to the next car.”
This might be giving a bad impression of the brand though … The 6 Lexii I’ve had so far have been fantastic cars. Their drive by wire behaviour fits exactly the behaviour I want from the cars I drive. I like to be able to settle into a chilled out essentially autopilot for cruising, with the option of going very quick when I need to. The CT200h (aka Posh Prius) is on the low side for power for me (10 sec to 60, 134bhp system power) but when you ask it to, it cheerfully gives you everything it’s got. And what it had was far more effective at getting down the road quickly than the performance Focus ST170 I had before.
The toys are great too. I’d like to keep going with the brand, except they’ve caught the marketing urge to move everyone into SUVs … which is not something that I can support. They get a lot of things right though, with no design stupidity like you’d get with Ford or dodgy electronics which you’d have with the French cars. Or cars which just disintegrate like certain other EU cars, cars which have special modes to cheat emissions and economy figures, or cars which are excessively difficult to repair by design.
Toyota (and Lexus) make excellent cars. Maybe it’s a Corolla next.
Book stuff ! I read two books while off on the holiday :
Erebus by Michael Palin. It’s tagline is that it’s the story of a ship. Essentially, two ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. They were special Napoleonic War ships, with the war ending before they could actually do their purpose. So after being mothballed for a while, visionary people saw their potential as extreme exploration ships with them being dispatched to the Antarctic and later the Northwest Passage. This book is the story of the ships and what we know of their expeditions. It’s well worth a peek as a look into life on the ships and the discoveries that were made when so much of the map was Terra Incognita with “Here Be Dragons” labels on it.
It was a bit of a slow one though, perhaps a bit too much in there and it felt like a bit of a slog. Still worth checking out though.
Next up was Winter World by A G Riddle. This one’s set in a near future Earth, which is becoming steadily colder. It’s like an Ice Age is coming but it’s not from planetary conditions, it’s ALIENS blocking out the sun. Good book too and it sets up a trilogy. I’ll be looking forward to reading the next two in a while when the book 2 is on offer. (Bought book 3 in a 99p offer)
Ref the cruise though, there will be more posts with pictures to come there but the quick summary is :
It was a Hurtigruten Expeditions cruise on MS Maud. She’s a small cruise ship accommodating around 300 guests. Cozy. The crew were amazing, making it a lovely experience from start to finish. The expeditions team were fun, super motivated, friendly people with an infectious spirit that got us massively looking forwards to what was coming up to see. And Norway supremely delivered on that promise of good things to see.
I’d thoroughly recommend them, when I do more cruising (and that’s a definite), I’ll be looking at Hurtigruten again. You see cruise ship and you think Party Boat. It was a fun atmosphere but it was much more about the getting out there and seeing great things than a dress up for dinner party ship. Just what I wanted and what I didn’t realise I needed.
Economical too, I was able to book less than 5 days before the sailing date with a nice little discount and … there is no solo traveller supplement like pretty much everything else applies to the cost of going away. The atmosphere on board totally supported solo travelling as well. You’d be placed with other people in the main restaurant for food but the guests were lovely too and meal conversations were very pleasant. I could have picked up a collection of great new friends on the trip. (I hope some of you remember me and are reading this – you’re amazing and made the trip much better !)
Disclosure note time – I paid fully for the cruise, the only freebies were what every traveller with them gets : free coffee, cookies, wifi, food, selected expedition things. There was absolutely no nickel and dime behaviour here (like you might remember me complaining about with Novotel)
It was a very rewarding, informative, pleasant, educational (camera, science, people) trip. And it was the getting away from the world that I desperately needed, even though I didn’t know ho much I needed it.
Last message ? Sometimes we need to get away from the world for a little while and do something different. The world can get you down. I hope you all get that chance to escape from it for a little while. I was having lots of fun out there and I hope the posts here about the trip and the pictures I was sending around the various parts of the internet brought out smiles.