Anticipation and hassles!

We motored up north to the little town of Chemainus, which features our favourite café on Willow Street, and where we often meet up with Cycleblaze bloggers Sue and Jim Price. Sue and Jim have taken to spending a lot of time in Mexico, and Sue's enthusiastic description of the sun, water, plants, and food they will soon be heading to helped to stoke our own anticipation of seeing tropical/semi-tropical Costa Rica.

We set up our usual To Do list, to be ready to leave. As I write this, we are one hour from leaving, and all that remains on the list is "Get Dressed". So that looks good.

It didn't always look that good. There is usually some kind of glitch that derails us as we try to go through the list. In a distressing number of cases, this tends to involve some kind of water leak in the house. Water and fire are what worry us most, as we walk out our door for extended periods. We are of course not short of sources of anxiety on this score, and can easily add wind, falling trees, and power outage, not to mention rampant grass and weed growth, road washout, and oh my! Fortunately, as soon as we are 10 km down the road, all thoughts of home are forgotten and put behind us (to be replaced by worries about catching that plane, and etc. etc. on the road.)

The glitch at home this time started when I innocently decided on a bath. We have a slightly oversized tub, which is quite a luxury when compared to the slim models found in hotel rooms that have a tub at all. But for some time there has not been enough hot water to fill the thing up. I had done some inconclusive investigation of this before (like, is the bottom heating element working?). For some reason I decided to look again at the heater. And this time the look revealed an inch of water in the catch pan under the heater. Water! That would be the same "water" that featured in my two item greatest worry list above! 

So the relaxing bath became panic stations. I could not quite see the source of the water, though there were some rust stains running down from both heater element locations. No matter, with departure then only two days away, I was primed to shoot at the problem, and not ask too many questions. A quick check of the clock showed that Canadian Tire, the chief competitor to Home Depot out here, was still open. A quick online price and availability check, and I was in the van headed for their door.

COVID sort of led me to expect that the thing would not be on hand. But that nightmare has passed, and two nice clerks threw the thing into the van quite handily. A large hot water heater, though nothing but a hollow thermos bottle, is actually quite heavy.  Especially with the shoulder still glitched from falling off my bike in Beaune, I had to drag out neighbour Travis to help with jockeying the old heater out and the new one into the house. 

Tired of fighting for enough hot water in the tub, I had bought a jumbo sized heater. One effect of this was to change the geometry of the water and electrical connections. So instead of ticking off easy items from the To Do list, I was shuttling back and forth to the store, for slightly longer or shorter parts.

But today. its done. And we both had super hot baths. We means we are relaxed and ready to head off, which we need to do in 45 minutes. 

Looks like hot baths to me!


We are in fact needing to fly tonight to Vancouver, thanks to a cancellation/rebooking exercise thrown by Air Canada. Once we reach Vancouver, we get to sleep in the airport, waiting for the next flight, tomorrow. Thanks, Air Canada! (It seems this phenomenon of flight cancellations is growing. We also already had notice of a change in our return flights. And on today's news, Westjet featured for delaying a flight by two days, causing a couple to have to pay an emergency high fee with another airline, to avoid missing their cruise ship connection. It made the news, because Westjet fought against compensating the couple.)

So it's hassles right now, but we harken to Sue Price, and her infectious anticipation. Costa Rica, here we come! (Sooner or later).

Comments

  1. Sue PriceDecember 2, 2024 at 10:02 AM

    Finally getting time to read your blog after working all of last week - saved this to read as we wait to board the ferry. Goodness, Steve, you sure like to do things under pressure!!!

    ReplyDelete

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