It’s time for a follow up to our Palma journey misadventures.

The good news - the clutch is fixed. Yippee!

The bad news - we need a new gearbox.

Our bags were packed… morale was high… we even had a window of opportunity where we might even have made the 11 o’clock Barcelona ferry. The mechanic had even washed his hands from the job, and when a mechanic washes his hands you KNOW you’re almost good to go.

Max ran to the hotel room to pick up the final bits and pieces. Meanwhile the mechanic emerged and as usual started speaking too much French too quickly. After about 5 minutes I picked up on a few repeating phrases:

‘deux problemmes’

and

‘boite de vitesse’

A quick look in our French-English dictionary confirmed the worst…
 To think we had the audacity to rate our chances of ever leaving this village as a 4 out of 10 in the previous blog post - it was supposed to have been tongue-in-cheek!!! 

We are stuck here for another 4 days minimum while the gearbox is sent to Ford for reservicing. I’m not even going to tell you how much it is going to cost.  

More malt-loaf and jam for breakfast. More jaffa cakes for lunch. We’re too frightened to order anything we can’t translate from our hotel’s dinner menu, which means more des omelettes du fromage for dinner.

At least we’re stuck in a pretty little town, though there is not exactly a compendium of things to do. We went for a mountain run to break up the monotony. Then spent the rest of the day recovering from altitude sickness. 

We went to the Slug to fetch my guitar only to realise that Max had left it in his wardrobe back at home. He insists that he ‘accidently’ forgot it, but in fact the real loser in this situation is Max anyway, because it is the only thing that helps drown out my singing.

Learning the guitar and learning French had actually been top of my list of non-sailing things to do this year. I fear forgetting the guitar and being stranded in France is perhaps fate’s way of trying to tell me something…

We’ll keep you posted

 Jonny and Max

Today’s stats:

• Visitors on this blog yesterday: 159
   
• Days since we last set foot in a boat: 7
   
• Percent improvent in our French speaking abilities: 1035% (this isn’t saying much)
• Percent increase in the repair bill since yesterday: 310%
   
• Number of times hopes dashed in the last 72 hours: 6
   
• Proportion of daily calories derived from malt loaf and jaffa cakes: 96%