Independent overland travel through Africa in a Unimog called Moglet

Well its been a busy week or so, not really any time for updating the website, so apologies for that...

We went to a place called Marine & Auto Electrics in Ipswich for the housekeeping, and they ended up spending a day or so working on Moglet. She previously had a 12volt circuit from each leisure battery, and a 24volt circuit spanning both. The various 12v lights and sockets were split between each battery, creating uneven discharging, with a compensating "black box" continuously balancing the levels of charge. This, we're told, can significantly shorten battery life and is a "bad thing". Initially we thought about fitting led lights throughout, so the drain and therefore inbalance would be minimsied. Although these are quite pricey, they would have a smaller power drain making more use of whats been stored in the first place, but current opinion seems to be they're not bright enough! Some friends replaced the leds they'd just bought for bigger ones for that reason. Gavin at Marine & Auto recommended we simplify things by just having a 24v circuit from the pair of batteries, change the lightbulbs to 24v halogens (taking half the current) except where they've been wired to come on as a pair (making use of the many 12v bulbs we still have!), leave the 24v stuff like the fridge and water pump unchanged, and have a 24v to 12v dropper for each of the 12v circuits. This only leaves the ceiling vent fans, radio and sockets as 12v, so meaning minimal load. One small anomally is the solar panels which are still individually connected as 12v to each battery, but replacing these may cost the same as a pair of batteries, and its a lot better than before! 24v 10w g4 halogens are a bit of a speciality though, so many spares needed?! The batteries are also charged up every time we plug into an electric hook-up. And as you may have guessed, Jason wrote that paragraph! :-)

Just up the road from the electricians is a place called Fox's, who are primarily a marine equipment supplier, but we're finding there's quite a lot of crossover on the bits and bobs side of things. We managed to spend far too much money in there, naturally, but also bought some useful stuff for under the bed. Over the last week or so we'd been waking up to considerable condensation inside Moglet, and although this was reduced by leaving vents open overnight (damn chilly at 3am!), the area around and under the bed was literally dripping wet by the morning. The bed is just a standard double mattress, supported by two single slatted srpung bases, so you'd think the air would still be able to move around, but apparently not. Not good for us, Moglet or the mattress. Its called VentAir, and is designed to go under seating in boats, helping things stay supported but allowing air flow. It's basically an inch thick section of scrunched up plastic stuff, looks kind of like an over-sized brillo-pad, sandwiched in between a fibrous, hessian kind of material on each side. It's much lighter than the slatted bases and, after about three days under the mattress, seems to be doing a good job. We needed to buy two boxes of it as it was supplied in 2m x 1m rolls, and at £40 a box it wasnt cheap, but its certainly money well spent if it looks after the mattress.

We've also been back to Newmarket for the rest of Jason's jabs and order his anti-malarials, as well as planning on picking up all my pills. Unfortunately a human error somewhere in the chain meant that the pharmacy had put together a years worth of the wrong Pill and the doctor wasn't working that day, so I've had to leave it all with them until the doctor could write out another prescription :-(

Plans wise, we're still expecting to be spending a few weeks in the UK before we leave for Europe and then Africa. Seeing as its already December (where the hell has this year gone??), its looking more and more likely that we'll be in the UK for Christmas. Not to say we have any idea at all where in the UK we'll be, but thats kind of half the fun of the trip! Seeing friends and family is obviously something we both want to do, but seeing them on Christmas day itself may not happen (not least becuase they're all scattered over the southern half of the country!).

I have to confess though, we have bought a few decorations for Moglet and may well be putting them up later on today :-) Christmas is just about my most favourite time of the whole year, I think I'd happilly give up birthdays if it meant I could have an extra Christmas day! Christmas presents can take a bit of a backseat this year, Moglet is already stuffed to bursting point (something else we're trying to address before we leave), and there's nothing we really need anyway, I'm happy to just eat, drink and be merry :-)

We're still at Jason's dads, one of the things we've done while we're here is make the fatal mistake of putting up a To Do list on a whiteboard - the list never seems to shrink, the items just get changed! It's easy to look at the list as feel like we're never going to leave, but as Jason said earlier in the week, we dont have to get it all done before we go, we just want to keep a note of all the little things we'd like to tweak. There's been a few bits which we really definitely had to get done while we were here, like tying down the water tank, but the 'Must Do' list is pretty short now.

Final plan for the week was to get an IT chap to look over our stuff and make sure its all as efficient as it could be, and he's coming to see us tomorrow. We have limitations based on the equipment itself but we'd like it to be as good as it can be before we leave...

Jason has also spent most of a day drilling holes in Moglets flooring so we can use ratchet straps to tie down the 320l water tank and the leisure batteries. A photo or two on that will follow as soon as I can find the camera!