Let the adventure begin!!

Well I did say I wanted moving to Cork to be an adventure and boy have I got adventure in spades. To give you an idea I still haven’t made it out of Wales yet!
It all started off OK with leaving work on time (Thanks for the cards & good wishes all) and was on the road as planed by 8. With the weather the UK has been having this last week I had planned to give myself 2 hours extra time, one of those hours was used up before we got to Brentford as London traffic wasn’t going to let me leave without a body shot. This meant that we missed a good dinner as we rolled into the Moto centre 5min after Burger king closed but the worst was yet to come.
Fast forward 3 hours of driving through atrocious weather and we’re making great time. Its 1am, we’re driving into Carmarthen with Pembroke only 30min away & the ferry leaves at 2:45am. Suddenly I lose power, not the spluttering you get when you’re a dumbass & run out of gas (I had over ½ a tank) but more like the accelerator pedal has been disconnected, as I slow down I try changing into a lower gear to kick-start the car, it worked but only for about another mile when I lost power for good. 5 minutes & quite a few choice words later X and I were quite wet & scratching our heads as to what to do when a coppa drove up, unfortunately he had a convict in the car so couldn’t give us a ride but did tell us that a 24 hour Tesco was only about 500m down the road. I think he thought that we would leave the car there & walk to Tesco…Silly police man! After pushing the car to the loading bay we wandered into the Tesco where -not for the last time- I would be reminded of the kindness of strangers. After the security guard heard of our situation & lack of AA cover he quietly came up and explained a policy that Tesco have of paying for the callout of any car that brakes down in their car park. So all we had to do was push the car another 5-600m into the car park…easier said than done as the last 150 metres were uphill! Just as we got it to the bottom of the hill & I was about to have a heart attack (It seems 15 years of smoking, drinking & little exercise have lowered my cardiac health levels!? Time to get back to the gym) another stranger stopped to give us a hand & we made it into the car park. It was now 2:30 so that nights ferry was out of the question but I had contacted them & they were happy to transfer our tickets to the 2:30pm sailing the next day. When the RAC guy turned up he confirmed what X & I had suspected that there was something wrong with either the fuel pump or fuel line. In the end we had him tow us to the industrial side of town so we would be close to a few garages when the sun came up & settled in for a cold, cramped night sleeping in the car. Sun up & I asked around for a good garage & left X with the car, while I toddled off find this guy. After a few hours waiting in the queue we started working on the car about 12 o’clock & around 1 we found the old ‘pull it apart put it back together’ had done the trick & the fuel pump was now working a charm. We had found a large piece of rubber in the tank & hypothesized that it had rapped over the intake of the pump & cut off the supply of fuel…Who cares we were on the road with more than enough time to catch the ferry…17miles from the ferry and I lose power…£*&@?!!! Long story short (Shorter) the mechanics couldn’t look at the car until today & won’t be getting the parts until tomorrow morning. Poor X obviously missed his 40min flight from Cork to London & had to catch an 8 ½ hour train ride home. So I couldn’t send him home without showing him Pembroke night life…I was thinking Matamata but it turned out to be more like Parramatta with a very funky pub, a tardis like club and a cute little shotie with glasses. Only thing was being trying to explain to Xavier that at 2am there is not going to be a takeaway store open in a town of about 7,000 people.
So sorry X promise to get you to the goal next road trip & the rest of you wish me luck and hopefully next time I chat, it’ll be from Cork.