Explore europe in a campervan

Since my last post we spent the weekend in the car park at Les Prodains.  It’s important to get there by Friday afternoon, because tourists start arriving from then for the weekend or to start their holidays, and we’ve been turned away on Saturday or Sunday before when the car park’s been full.  The weather got colder, but we still went up the mountain every day.

Until Tuesday, when the forecast predicted quite a lot of snow, so we decided to take shelter at the campsite for a couple of nights and get lots of work done (except posting on here – oops!).  There was some snow, but nowhere near what we had expected.  But we caught up on work, e-mails, washing and gave everything a good charge.

The problem with the alternator not charging the battery was persisting so, while we were hooked up for a couple of days, Simon switched the van’s electrics onto ‘touring’ mode.  Usually you use this switch to charge the leisure battery from the alternator when you’re driving.  However, we suspected and Steele confirmed that the batteries will balance out so we were effectively charging the engine battery from the hook-up.  At least this meant we left the site with a charged battery, but still the alternator wasn’t charging.  After another look to check connections we concluded that the actual alternator is just too far down inside the engine for us to look at.

So on Friday, after a night in Morzine, we headed back to our friendly garage man in the centre of town.  He understood the problem, but referred us to a nearby garage in Montriond, as he deals mainly in mechanical problems.  Once there I managed to explain the problem again, along with the fact that we can’t leave the van with them overnight as we would be homeless!  Fortunately the mechanic booked us in for this Monday and suggested that if it’s not finished they’ll tow the van out of the garage so we can sleep in it on Monday night. Hopefully this means it will be fixed before our gas runs out as it definitely wouldn’t manage a trip to Cluses right now.

We came back to Les Prodains for the weekend and got out on the slopes for a couple of hours on Friday afternoon to find a total mixture of fresh snow and solid ice that felt like snowboarding on marble!  As I write, on Saturday, it has been raining all day, as forecast.  We’re waiting for it to turn into snow now as the level of freezing is supposed to drop in altitude.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 8:01 am and is filed under Diary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.