Chores, Chores, Chores!

Friday 7 February

Busy busy Friday in Ōtautahi Christchurch - doing Banjo & Pajero chores and killing time.

We checked out of Weedons NZMCA park quite early to get to our first appointment. It was nothing special as a camp, but had the advantage of running water, clean toilets and a good location for south Christchurch - and only $10 per night.

Our first stop was to drop Banjo off at the Design Coach & Body Motorhome Shop where Steve was scheduled to check out our leak and report back to Vanari (and hence Snowy River) about his recommendations for a permanent fix. He and Louis climbed up to have a good look at what was going on up on the roof and after checking inside and spotting the bumpy area on the ceiling directly below the crack that Louis had found outisde and covered, he diagnosed that someone had likely dropped something like the corner of the aircon unit on the roof during installation and patched up the damage - but the patch had not held. The two options for long term resolution were a full replacement of the roof (2-3 weeks in the body shop and no guarantees of future watertighness around the edges) or add an aluminium patch which could then be disguised by the addition of a MIMO system to boost reception.

Travelling light without Banjo we headed on to St Albans near the centre of the city to meet Basil who offers a service to revamp the electronic computer which controls the engine to get better performance - ie he tuned it up to make it more grunty on the hills! This would take 3-4 hours so we wandered into town via the Red Cross Op Shop (sadly nothing for me today), Miro coffee shop which looked cool but was full of suits having business meetings, a derelict remnant of the quakes (whose safety fence had some great murals), the park where they were setting up the lanterns for Chinese New Year and finally ended up at Riverside Market (again!) for morning tea. Louis had a coffee and I had a cinnamon brioche scroll from my favourite patisserie - oops!

With more time to kill, we wandered a bit more, bought Jez a birthday present and felt a bit chilly (it was a lot colder than the afternoon before, and not a peep of sunshine) before heading back to Riverside Market for lunch at Ramen Ria which was delicious.

We then went back out to Basil's to collect the car and drove off with our newly upscaled engine first to the Design Coach & Body guys to check in on their progress then into town again to Tony's Tyre Service in Papanui to get a wheel alignment (Louis got a massage at the mall and I went to Mitre10 to get some more hose bits while this was happening) before last chore of the day - an oil change in Hornby... then, pheww, we were done for the day. TBH, I think we were both done in too!

After 6 days on solar power and a rather grey day we treated ourselves to a powered campsite for the night… but that only brought on more chores - laundry this time!