Dan woke up this morning feeling a bit sick, so we took the morning slowly. The first thing we did at a reasonable time, about 8:00am, was to phone the garage and ask them what was happening with the car, as we had received no call the evening before as promised. The woman we got on the phone was less than helpful, she had no idea what was happening with the car, when Herman the mechanic was going to take a look at it, or when we could expect a phone call about what was wrong with it.
After showering and eating pizza for breakfast (yum!) we decked that as it was half 10 and we had not heard anything about the car yet we would walk to the garage and hopefully talk to someone with more than half a clue about what was happening in life. Our hopes were dashed when we arrive, our land rover was still outside and no one was about. The same dumb woman was in the reception area, and when asked what was happening we got the same glassy eyed look and 'I don't know' response. We also learned that the mechanic, Herman, had 'gone out' and she had no idea when he would be back. How frustrating!!! We decided to walk a little way down the road to where the river leads out to Plettenberg bay and the ferries operate to sit on the banks of the river to wait. After around half an hour we phoned again, and you guessed it, had to talk to the dumb woman again. However, progress had been made, Herman had taken Snolly out for a drive! Hurray!
After a little while longer we walked back down the road to the garage a d walked down to where we could see Snolly, just outside the work shop. Thankfully Herman was about to talk to!! The bad news is that he had no idea why she blew through coolant, she did the same for him that morning but now was running fine. She also had a pressure test to check for leaks, and the pressure in the system as fine. We left again to let him get on with looking at her, with the promise of a phone call in about an hour. We walked towards the Dunes and stopped at a little Cafe and shop called Thime and Again, where I had some juice and Dan enjoyed a very tasty Cornish pasty! About an hour past and we had still had no phone call so we decided to walk home and stop bothering them, mostly because Dan still felt ill.
We watched a couple of hours of the highlights of the ICC world 20/20 cricket (read, Dan watched the cricket, I fell asleep!) before we finally got a call from the garage! This time it was the same dumb woman, to tell us our car had been fixed. At this point we said, well what was wrong with it and what did I fix, because no body phoned us to talk to us about any work. She, of course, had no idea what had been done, and said that Herman had spoken to a Daniel about the work. Well he hadn't. Not being able to beat any more useful information out of the slow specimen of human, we just walked back to the garage, where we were presented with a bill of R638. For what, we asked? The bill charged us for a pressure test, a carbon test and for an hours labour plus vat. So we demanded that she ring Herman to find out what had been done to fix the issue in the car, to which we were told that he could find no problem, the car had not gone through any more coolant, and that was that. She did mention that the coolant could have been pushed out of the system of the cap was not put back on properly again after the last time we checked the level, but we really didn't appreciate a bill of £50 to be told to screw the cap on properly by a woman who probably couldn't tell her left foot from her right.
Finally we had wheels again!!! As the diesel level had severely gone down during Germans drives to test the land rover we drove into Plett to fill her up and also to book a facial for me for the next day, at a place that proved nearly impossible to find as it was about a mile down the road from where the sat nav and the phones gps told us it was! After booking the facial for 11am the next morning we drove home to eat a light dinner of salad asDan was still not feeling great, watch some more cricket and go to sleep.
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