When planning such an expedition, you always expect that there are hiccups and unforeseen problems down the line of your preparations. This past week was exceptionally problem-ridden on many fronts. Let me update you on some of my challenges at the moment.

Visas

As I still have not yet heard anything official about my entry-visa application of Guinea, I headed over to the embassy for the third time last Thursday. I was finally granted an audience with the Senegalese Consul. It was a lengthy visit and trying to find my application proved to be difficult, but he managed. At the end he promised me that he would deal with it. So far no progress. Tomorrow morning I shall visit him again and ask what is holding back the approval. An ongoing challenge.
At the end of last week, I had to notice that apparently my visa for Cote d’Ivoire seems to have expired. I will deal with this first thing tomorrow morning. Another unforeseen challenge!

Laptop

While preparing for the trip I took my laptop, which I had given a second life in Germany in July by replacing the battery pack and swapping the SSD card (hard disk) to a four times bigger version. The old hard drive had gotten too small as more and more programmes ask for more disk space and for the trip I wanted to be able to store pictures on the internal drive rather than on an external one.

That new drive proved to be a troublemaker. Soon after the swap, my laptop would crash during sleep time and I had to restart it. Looking into the problem, fora told me, that there seems to be an incompatibility with my type of laptop and that type of SSD card. Bummer!
I found a workaround, the laptop would crash less often and I could live with this, certainly for the trip. Until last night. I grabbed my laptop and wanted to work in the dining room. On the short way it had crashed again, but this time it did not want to restart any more. It just got stuck at the logo screen indicating that it had trouble finding the hard drive. Back in my little office, I quickly opened the ten screws holding the back plate and took the new SSD card out and the old one with a quarter of the capacity back in. Fortunately, I had left it as it was when I took it out. Although now the problem was that I had many hours of extra work. Many programmes had already been updated and I had already copied over files for the trip and installed all the GPS data in the various navigation apps. All this had to be redone now with less space on the hard drive. Another challenge you do not want so shortly before the expedition.
The first thing my laptop wanted was the system update again that could now not be done due to insufficient space! Grrrrmph! I am still working hard on it to get it all ready before leaving.

Printer

Our laser printer had for some time shown increasing stripes on the printouts. As these were black I guessed it was the black toner that had gotten old and absorbed humidity. So I bought a new original black toner cartridge for lots of money and installed it. Same result. No change. Damn!

At the moment I need to print a lot of documents, either updated packing lists or information to take along. A working printer is quite essential right now.

So, last night while waiting for my laptop to update things, I disassembled the printer trying to find out the cause. I found lots of toner had accumulated in spaces inside the printer where it did not belong. Time for a good clean. The laser unit was also taken out and thoroughly cleaned with pure alcohol and Q-tips. Once cleaned, I think I had found the cause of my problems. Traces of a little rubber lip that scrapes the toner off the imaging drum was no longer there where it belonged. Now I have to hunt for a new imaging drum that is probably half the price of a new laser printer. My next challenge!

Final set up and kitting out of Eeyore

On a positive note, I continued with the final assembly of Eeyore and made good progress. Fortunately, today I tested the functionality of the awning of Eeyore. It had been storage for a long time. I had cleaned it in between. A good try out and reminder for me how everything fits together again and in which order it needs to be set up.

More items also got ticked off my long to-do-list, such as installation of an emergency key somewhere under the car, some emergency money somewhere inside the car and fixing some electrical gremlins.

The roof top tent also got a little upgrade today. The pole support holding the roof up got a bit of an upgrade as the roof of the roof top tent is now a couple of kilos heavier due to the newly installed solar panel. Once that was done, the final cleaning on the inside could commence and the underlining of the mattress could be laid out. Now the difficult bit, always a challenge, which I always hate to do but unfortunately there is no other way. To put the mattress into the base of the roof top tent while it is open and already mounted on top of the car. With lots of pushing, bending, swearing, sliding, sweating and more pushing, I managed. Another item off the to-do-list.

The next challenge will be to fit all this stuff I have been carefully preparing and packing these past weeks into Eeyore to leave room for my travel companions. It will be a three-dimensional Tetris! Challenge accepted!