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| Our kit - now you see it... |
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| ...now you don't |
The big day looms and yesterday we got all our equipment together for the first time and fitted it into the Tab and the Land Rover. See picture ‘Our kit’, the items not in the picture are lubricants and spares. By the way to save time and a few key strokes we call our Land Rover ‘Pyj’ after its registration number. It all fitted in easily as we had planned it carefully, as you can see in the second picture. Mike then nipped round to the local gravel pit to get it weighed on their weighbridge. The complete unit was 3.320 tonnes and individually the Land Rover was 2.5 tonnes and the Tab 0.820 tonnes. The caravan nose weight was only 63 kg, all within specifications. However the water jerrycans on the front of the Tab were empty at the time. When they are filled up the nose weight goes up to 93 kg - not quite so good. Pyj was a bit down at the back when loaded and in the afternoon the roof box of lubs and the diesel jerrycans (one empty at the moment) were moved forward on the roof rack to try to even up the overall load. Later, a re-examination of all our stuff revealed that several of the heavy but not so essential items could be discarded to save a bit of weight - in fact we shed about 40 kg of kit and tools. This included the bird table! Not such a daft idea - we started using a bird table last September in Scotland and on our first day we had Crested Tit on it!
