Two Weeks to go… One Van, One Bike, and a Very Helpful Cat
The ferry’s booked for two weeks from now. That one sentence has turned the whole thing from “someday” into a countdown, and suddenly every loose end I’ve been quietly ignoring for the two months I’ll be away has shown up at once demanding attention.
The bike
First win of the week: a second-hand bike from Cyclists Fighting Cancer in Stratford — a brilliant charity that refurbishes donated bikes and sells them on to raise money for cancer support services, so every wobble on those tyres is doing double duty. This one’s got proper character — a hand-painted blue-flame frame that looks like it’s been through a few adventures already, but has had several new components including wheels, cassette, tyres and chain. Exactly the kind of “it just needs to work, not win a beauty contest” bike for knocking around a build site in Portugal. It’s already been test-fitted into Hank’s garage purpose designed an built for such a thing. Really nice to see my meticulous designs tested out in real life. I took it for a 6-mile ride to visit my Auntie for her 70th Birthday party and it performed great apart from a minor issue with gear indexing which I will pop back to the shop to get sorted no bother.
The fly screen
While away for said birthday party I was able to properly test out and think what needs finishing on Hank. BUGS were top of the list!
Ordered a Vandour universal campervan mosquito net – sensible given where it’s heading, and rural Portugal in summer is not somewhere you want your only defence against insects to be “close the door and hope.” It clips into the sliding door seal, keeping air moving without turning the van into an all-you-can-bite buffet overnight.
The list that keeps growing
Alongside the shopping, there’s the actual finishing list for Hank — the boring-but-essential stuff:
- Upholstery – my ‘sofa’ is a piece of wood on the metal frame so I have ordered upholstery foam and fabric
- Bug screens throughout (the sliding door is nearly sorted, need to work out what to do for the window)
- Shower curtain
None of it’s hard, all of it’s time, and with two weeks left, time is the one thing getting shorter by the day.
New work clothes
Bought some proper work clothes too – because turning up to a build site in whatever’s left over from Product Owner life isn’t going to survive two months of actual physical work.
And then there’s Mili
The hardest logistics puzzle isn’t the van at all – it’s finding someone to look after the cat for two months. Mili has become extremely interested in supervising every trip up and down the stairs, ears up, eyes huge, clearly aware that something is afoot. Signed up to TrustedHousesitters.com to try and find someone reliable – a sitter living in and keeping her routine normal feels a lot kinder than boarding for that length of time, but it does mean vetting strangers to hand over the keys and the cat to, which is its own small stress.
Two weeks to go, a half-finished van, a bike with a story, and a cat with no idea what’s coming. Onwards.