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Family Tour 2018 Day 3-4
Continuing on our family tour, Our next visits are a day at Edinburgh Zoo, followed by traveling over the third Forth Bridge (Queensferry crossing) and up into the Cairngorms
See also Family Tour 2018 Day 1-2
Day 3: 24/09/2018, Edinburgh Zoo (20 miles)
After letting the dogs have a bit of exercise and chatting with our neighbours, we headed over to the Zoo to meet up with my brother in law and his family who were down in Edinburgh for the weekend to meet up with us. It was great walking through the enclosure with the Lorikeets, and my daughter also loved watching the penguins swimming around. We spent pretty much the whole day there, and there was more than enough to keep 4 adults and a 4 year old and 9 month old interested.
Hopefully embedded below are a selection of some of my photos from the zoo
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Lunch for me at the zoo was haggis pizza. I'm sure thats a 100% authentic local dish.... It was tasty!
After that, we headed back to the caravan to check in on our dogs, and let them have their tea, before we headed out to find food at the near by retail park. The places we looked at eating had a bit of a wait, so we split up and left one of us holding a position in the wait for food, while my wife and sister-in-law did some shopping, and I looked for a hammer or a hex drive as I couldn't locate the one that should have been with the awning for the normal or screw pegs. Halfords didn't have much without buying way more than I needed, but Argos had a tent spares kit which as well as a rubber mallet, had spare wire pegs and rope.
We all eventually reconvened at Frankie and Benny's, and enjoyed a nice meal together before we went our separate ways
Family Tour 2018 Day 1-2
It's been a little while since I posted an update, so over the next few weeks I'll try and post a little bit about our "grand tour" as we nicknamed it, a trip of approximately 2000 miles from home to Scotland and back again, stopping off with family and friends along the way.
We did this over a course of 2 weeks and we didn't stay at a campsite for more than 2 nights. It was kind of inspired by some of the fun we'd had a couple of years before with a motorhome on the North island of New Zealand, only this time there would be the 2 of us, plus our 2 dogs, and our 10 month old daughter.
This meant we did our best to break the journeys down into manageable chunks to fit in with feeding, sleeping and nappy changing requirements!
Update - Caravan heating mods
I found the real cause for poor performance on the heat vent in the bedroom.
I did what I should have done first before modifying things. Traced the duct all the way back between the bedroom, under the caravan, back inside under the oven, beneath the fridge and to the heater.
Under the oven was a plywood plate held in by 2 screws, with the back pipework for the bathroom vent, and the duct that leads to the bedroom. On a slight whim, I removed this panel to prove where these pipes went, and this is what I found:
Caravan Heating Mods
Another little mod, that is in progress, but I'll try and walk through what I've done
The 'van has Truma blown air heating, with 4 air vents, as opposed to some slightly more expensive caravans that have Alde based wet heating, much more like a conventional domesting central heating system, with a header tank and radiators.
Being a special edition, one of the upgrades we got was "butterfly" valves on these air vents, allowing shutting off / restricting the flow of certain vents, to encourage hot air out of the others. This is needed to keep heat roughly balanced, as the air duct to the bedroom is significantly longer than the one to the lounge. This image shows roughly the route the 4 different ducts take. The blue is to the bedroom and is the coolest. The dashed portion is where the duct is underneath the van on the outside
