I’m impressed by your patience 🙂

Autoaid + credit card, they’re likely to have paid before the card’s due. Although recovery’s not as expensive as you might think — if you’ve not got the cash to cover that, I’m not sure how you afford to run a car in the first place 🙂

I think my group numbers 10 adults and half a dozen kids. I have no distinguishing features beyond being a bit skinny with not much hair. No idea what bike I’ll take. We’ll be one of the clusters of camper vans 🙂

Our last house was built in 1690 out of lumps of rock and cowshit (probably). No cavities, no DPC and yes, occasionally we had damp issues. Every single one could be traced to a blocked gutter, a leaking window, a slipped roof tile or something else letting rainwater go somewhere it shouldn’t, with the exception of the bits in the backs of cupboards that were condensation on cold walls with inadequate ventilation.

I’m outraged. I was just travelling along the information superhighway on my way to somewhere VITAL when I got stuck behind a slow-moving forum thread. Wretched thing dribbled on for 15 pages and no-one would pull it over and let me past. Made me late for some very important humorous cat pictures, it did. HAVE SOME CONSIDERATION.

The “standard” is the dropout spacing and the diameter of the axle. How it secures to the frame varies. Axle needs to match frame, but actual hubs are interchangeable.

A tragic news story, but the fact that it makes the news tells you how relatively rare it is.

Or a Wanderer, which is kind of like a Wayfarer but a bit smaller and lighter (although still pretty heavy) and easier to right. Although the downside is that there are fewer around, and they’re smaller.

BWAAAARP!

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There’s a faulty premise in the thread title: the mean average absolutely does not suggest that a 106,000 mileage car is likely to be ready for the scrapheap. Journalists make this kind of error with basic statistical concepts all the time and it boils my urine.

I wholeheartedly endorse this post 🙂

rust kills many/most cars doesn’t it?

Certainly used to, these days it seems to be some big mechanical (or electronic) repair that kills them off. They don’t rust as badly as they used to. I’ve got a 02 Peugeot that’s just gone over 130,000, no rust anywhere but most of the suspension needs replacing. Previous car got sold for buttons because it needed more spending on it to keep it going than it was worth. That did actually have 105,000 on it…

As someone said above, crashes and the scrappage scheme will have pulled the average down a lot.

Wiggins had a visor on the start ramp, I assume it ended up by the roadside somewhere 🙂

Who does that prevent kids either walking to school themselves

Depends on the kids. Averse though I am to cotton-woolling them, I don’t think many people would be happy to send five or six year olds to school unaccompanied.

or being dropped off near the school (within say 500m) but not directly outside the gates?

Nothing (although it doesn’t solve anything, 500m is still well within the blast radius at our local one…).

I didn’t realise it’d be necessary to exhaustively list every parameter that might conceivably make driving a child close to school of a morning to be justified 🙂 However, you’re making the same point I am, which is that such circumstances are somewhat rare.

(Our walk to school goes past houses from which people drive…)

Nowt wrong with them if you have enough amps ut they are wastefull [ inefficient]

That’s kind of what I meant 🙂 They’re usually woefully underspecced (I know mine is, but it works well enough that rebuilding it to deliver more current is some way down the jobs list). I don’t ask much of my leisure battery, though — the water pump’s the only big drain and that’s only on for a few seconds at a time. Gas fridge FTW 🙂

I’m sure that there are people with legitimate reasons for driving kids to school — if you have an inflexible employer who insists on you being in work at a time that doesn’t allow for a 15 minute walk back from school, for instance.

I’m equally sure that those people are in the minority 🙂

What everyone else said. Split charge relay is not a proper charger, it’s a top-up at best. Either fit a hook-up and build a charger in or charge the battery at home before leaving for the weekend.

There’s someone who lives near to our local primary school who’s had people parking on their actual driveway in the morning. Mental.

You’re ten miles per hour beyond the upper reaches of gearing on a triple MTB chainset

At 42mph? It’s possible to pedal faster than 90rpm, you know 😉

(115rpm on a 44/11 gives you 42mph)

Drive into someone, their insurers will figure it out soon enough.

I’ve got them all back to issue 4, must get hold of the first three sometime 🙂

you are happy to ride your local trails illegally

It’s not illegal to ride a bike on a footpath in England or Wales.

Natural History Museum has a life-size animatronic T-Rex. ’nuff said 🙂

Interactive stuff downstairs in Science Museum good for younger ones too.

(In both cases wait until the afternoon for shorter queues, they won’t have the attention span for much time inside anyway.)

Fun big sandpit/playpark at the south-west corner of St James’s Park just over the road from Buckingham Palace, good spot for picnic lunch.

And don’t mention Hamley’s.

I got a Fiamma (I think) safety net — it’s designed for overcab beds on coachbuilts so was a bit wide, but nothing that a hacksaw couldn’t sort out 😉 Essentially the same as that Southwest Campers one and about the same price, so I’d get that — they didn’t do them when we bought ours.

(6 and 3 year olds in a hightop, not sure what our roof boards are made of but they’ll take the weight of two adults…)

I’m pretty sure Drac’s just demonstrating how easy it is to get a picture to make an ebay listing for something you don’t actually have. Or indeed seven things you don’t have.

– im not sure i missed out whos side you were on , but this quotation sums it up for me.

I’m on my side 🙂 I think probably the same one as you, roughly.

case point set and match !

Either we’re playing different games or one of our points is not what the other thinks it is 🙂

what if that had been two fell runners, would the walkers have been as outraged..?

Fell runners would have been slower, lighter and without a foot of rigid bar sticking out either side of them and hence would have considerably diminished ability to actually hurt anyone. I expect they could still cause outrage simply by running straight at people and yelling 😉

responsible access says there is nothing anyone can do to stop me doing so.

In what sense would taking a large group hiking up a World Cup DH track on a weekend be “responsible”?

in england its set in stone with a you cant ride here

For the most part, it’s “you have no right to ride here and could in theory be sued by the landowner if you do”. Which is somewhat different to “can’t”.

stopping and getting started again on a steep technical descent can be nearly impossible

Are we expecting ascending hikers to know that? Seems faintly unreasonable to expect other people to make allowances for the limitations of your chosen conveyance and skillz 😉

If the argument is that we shouldn’t be there at all in case the frankly unlikely threat of a ban comes into play then by not going into the mountains, we have created a self fulfilling prophecy.

I don’t think that’s the argument, or at least not one that anyone in this thread has made 🙂 AFAICT the “anti” view is that if you’re going to ride Ben Nevis it’s best to do it when there are relatively few people about in the interests of (a) more fun and (b) better PR. Seems fairly uncontroversial to me, TBH.

we have laws saying you can’t ride that and if you do you can be prosecuted

Not in general we don’t, even in England 🙂

A Caravelle or Multivan (in T3 or T4 flavours) with a poptop/roof bed and a kitchen in the back might work if the kids are small.

Mm. I think unless you can bung some of ’em into an awning or pup tent, you’re into coachbuilt territory here. Still, probably cheaper than a roadworthy VW 😉

Berlin is T2 only, isn’t it? Proper seatbelts for three in the back is unlikely.

Are there any reliable statistics on the rates/risk of infection?

Apparently not. I read somewhere (sorry, hopeless citation 😉 ) that they had to have been feeding for 36 hours before they could pass Lymes on, so there’s a bit of a window. Sooner the better clearly, though.

Cash if collecting in person, make all arrangements via ebay messages so there’s a record, receipt.

I’ve lost count of how many I’ve had, but it’s loads. Also plenty of practice on the cats, who used to get them on their heads almost constantly. Found one on my lad’s tummy after a camping weekend when he was under 2. They can be hard to spot when they’ve just got on, it’s well worth checking carefully — getting them off before they get into their feeding stride makes it a lot less likely that you’ll pick up something nasty from them.

We did Langkawi, then over to Borneo to Kota Kinabalu and Kuching (didn’t have time to do Mt Kinabalu, it’s a 2-3 day trip from the north coast), then Johor Bahru to visit wife’s relatives, couple of nights in Singapore, couple of nights in Kuala Lumpur, home. Langkawi and Borneo were the best bits.

This was 2004, we were in Singapore when the tsunami hit, didn’t notice. The hotel we’d stayed at on Langkawi a fornight previously got flooded, so we timed that reasonably well.

[holiday snaps: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mike-davis/sets/72157615512961008/with/3363866996/ ]