Late get up again today, after looking at the forecast and needing to get some jobs done I decided today was a task day. The weather predictions had cloud and some sun, but also high percentage of rain and wind. I had wanted to climb Croagh Patrick but thought I’d best get the tasks done rather than risk a day on the mountain with variable weather conditions. I started off by changing my gas bottle. Last night when I had been cooking, I noticed the gas was very low and hardly cooked my dinner, so my first job was to remove the bottle and connect my spare camping gas cannister. This is a lot smaller and is only a quick fix until I find a new bottle. There would be no point carrying two large bottles as I would assume they last a long time and would be a wase of space and weight in the van. I’d had this bottle since I bought the van last August but had obviously only used it rigorously the past 3 weeks. I thought it had lasted a good amount of time, but I’m clueless to how long they should last.
After being able to now make a cuppa and cook breakfast, I could boil some water to do a wash. Wash done and the next task was the spice rack. I had used command hooks to attach the spice rack to the wall of the van, so that I could remove it when I needed to use the plug sockets (located behind it), but as I was driving one day early in the trip in Wales, I took a corner and the weight of the spices pulled the rack off the wall and they all went flying! Unfortunately, this ended in one of the strings being snapped on my guitar, as mentioned previously. So, I’d bought some sandwich bags to swap my spice jars for, a suggestion from Aga who had helped at Pandy Farm, and a brilliant one at that. True they don’t look as nice, as Aga had mentioned, but a hell of a lot lighter. So I reapplied the hooks and hey presto spice rack back in use.
I now needed a replacement gas bottle, so decided to drive into the nearest town, which I’d wanted to visit anyway, Westport. On driving through I’d spotted a petrol station, which would be my first port of call, now to find somewhere to park, forever my bugbear. Is there on street parking, for free? Or do I need to pay for somewhere? I had actually clocked on the map earlier on that there was a Tesco on the outskirts, which would be an option, and looking now I could see it was a short walk from the petrol station.
After parking up, I ventured to the petrol station and asked the question. They didn’t do gas, but I was pointed in the direction of the fishing tackle man. Upon getting to him he advised he wasn’t able to store gas bottles so sent me in the direction of a ‘handyman’ type chap, whose shop he didn’t know the name of, but was at the top of James Street. I made my way there and couldn’t see anything fitting the description after walking up and down a couple of times. I decided to ask a market stall holder, and he pointed me in the direction of a guy who sold gas bottles, but they might only be big ones. He also suggested a couple of camping shops if I had no luck there. Anyway, this chap ended up, luckily, having one bottle that I needed, a 904. He didn’t usually stock them, and this was a rogue one. Triumph, think I need a cuppa! I headed for a café to have a brew, a read of my book, and get my water bottles filled up. I fully made use of the 2 hours free parking at Tesco, got more supplies, then headed to my next britstop place, a car park by a very small harbour, and read my book for the rest of the day. It was a strange place, very secluded, with the odd dog walker coming by, but there seemed to be cars, generally taxis, coming and going throughout the evening, when there was nothing but a boat landing area and nothing else. My imagination immediately went to illegal dealings!