Well, that’s another Easter break over.

The trip home was without incident other than the fog+drizzle in Cornwall, horse boxes and slow traffic on the A roads up to Truro and the rain just before Exeter, and this on a day where most of the UK was basking in sunshine. Indeed, by the time I got home the sun was shining and the temperature was up to 25C! Crazy for mid April.

The car is definitely running in now as I got ~38mpg out of it on the journey. I have discovered that GM have cut even more costs as turning the air conditioning off doesn’t actually save petrol. On the old 9-3 the aircon pump was disconnected when the “ECON” button was pressed so it didn’t cause drag on the engine and hence increased the fuel efficiency.

Unlike the rest of the country, the weather here today was dull, grey, cloudy and generally wet. A stream of rain cloud came out of France and spoilt the day.

Anyway, overall we completed the paperwork for my Dad to take my old car and transfered his insurance over and he took it for its first drive.

Other happenings, a trip to Tesco’s (woo!) and to fill up my car with petrol, diagnose and fix the problem my parents were having with their VCR and show my Dad how to use OpenOffice.org 2.2 Impress to generate an advert for the Cavalier.

I’m now mostly packed and ready for the journey back to Oxford tomorrow, the third trip along those roads in four days.

Well, the ferrying mission went as planned. Drove to my house in my Dad’s car yesterday without incident, got the old car washed at Tesco’s (as all the other car washes were closed) and showed off my new HiFi to my Dad in the evening.

Today we drove back down in convoy and, despite it being Friday the 13th there were no problems. I even managed to get 43.8mpg out of the old girl, probably helped by the heavy traffic reducing the speed for most of the M5 down to about 60mph.

As for the cold, it’s still being annoying. It’s now getting down to my chest and into my sinuses. Still, it shouldn’t last too much longer.

The cold really attacked overnight last night leaving me dozing for most of it with intermittent choking events so I was rather tired on top of the lack of energy instilled by the cold itself. Thankfully, by tonight it’s moved into the nose so i should get a better sleep.

Due to the lack of energy I didn’t do a great deal today. A bit more playing Oolite, a trip with my parents to ASDA in Penryn and resting on my bed was all that I could manage.

Tomorrow we travel up in my Dad’s current car (which is my old, old car, the green Cavalier) to Oxford so that we can on Friday ferry my old car down here as my Dad’s bought it off me. It’s unlikely, therefore, that I’ll be updating this journal tomorrow evening as all my laptops will still be down here in Cornwall.

Today I went off to see Chris and Meriel. Much tea was drunk, cake eaten and Fedora Core 6 hacked. (The more I used it the less I liked it.)

On a less jolly note, I’m coming down with another cold. The sore throat started last night and has now started migrating noseward. Blurgh! It’s not fair, it’s only been two weeks since the height of the last cold. :-/

Hmm.. what can I say other than the day started off grey and cloudy so I started playing Oolite…. I did stop… at 9pm. Ooops! And I’m still only “Average.”

A lazy day. Watched the Grand Prix, Time Team and played Oolite on the laptop. The weather’s still nice but I didn’t fancy walking today.

Quite a quiet day really. Merely a trip to Asda in Penryn this morning and a short (1 hour) walk this evening.

Well, after two weeks i think I can give a reasonable overview of my new car, the executive summary being: You can tell GM has taken over at SAAB.
Overall the car is good and drives well and in general is a good car, however the devil is in the detail and you can tell that SAAB is no-longer its own boss and it is the little things which show. I’m talking about detail fit and finish such as the front grill and the door mirror switch plates being a little loose in thier mountings, the water bottle filler pipe not being held securely and the fact that the fuel filler cap is not tethered. The old 9-3 used GM switch gear but you could see that the engineering around it was good and there had been no corners cut, I can see too many cut corners in the current model and penny pinching (such as making the warning triangle an optional extra and not having a specific storage area for it) and all this on a car in the “luxury saloon” market. It just feels like unnecessarily sloppy engineering.

SAAB is not the marque it used to be.

For today’s walk I first drove over to Church Cove, which is about 2 miles from here as the crow flies but about 9 miles by road, and parked in the  National Trust car park. I then marched northwards along the coast path past Gunwallow Fishing Cove and right up to Looe Bar. I stopped in the Gunwallow beachside cafe, which turned out to be based in someone’s conservatory and got rather ripped off.. £3 for a glass of orange juice!

Still, it was a very nice walk and took me about two and a half hours in total.

Upon return I found that a nasty sea gull had bombed my car so after dinner I had to wash down the car again. Grrr…