Bike and guitars...

The Shadow has gone, I must admit I got a bit emotional about that...Even though I only rode it occasionally it was a long standing dream of mine to own one... and I did.... and now I don't... sigh.

Also got a couple more mid priced guitars sold, one to a dealer who took it as it was, so he can do his own clean and set up, and another is going to a student after the luthier has serviced it. Though if the student backs out that dealer will be happy to take her.

Only the really cheap tatty ones left... not really confident I will get them sold, but we'll see if not I'll donate them to the school so they can use them for the jamclub I founded..

Oh I still have my mighty 12 string but that will have to be sold, At this rate, I've go 2 electric and 2 acoustics to pack, and there will be duty on this... 

We put the fridge and sofa on Marktplaats, and we "may" have a buyer for the fridge but.. they've not shown up today to look at it... not a good sign, but we'll see they may have just taken advantage of me saying there was no mad rush.

The Sofa has attracted some interest too, but one from a smartarse making jokes, and another with a lowball and not willing to go up... (very Dutch). But they will sell... That just leaves the beds and washing machine... not the easiest of things to sell.

I've got lightweight solid (foam) cases for my Breedlove Acoustic and Margret, my beloved Patrick Eggle Berlin, which means I can now pack them in the cases, put them in the big box and ship them, I'll use my Vintage Les Paul for the last few gigs, unless we can arrange for the shipping to collect the day before we vacate... Gotta keep at least one spare usable guitar.. and I can leave it with one of my friends while it sells on Marktplaats. Actually I have one more up at the rehearsal studio I need to get back and repaired... probably for sale.... we'll see, its another Eggle, not as nice as Margaret but stll a vintage Eggle... maybe I'll pack her too :D

Ahthankyew

Packing....so much stuff

Yup, we have begun the packing, books, kitchen stuff, dvd's and art...oh and guitars, I had to buy a couple of new cases to pack them into a nice big box. We can take 3cubic meters, so thats quite a lot of boxes, even though some are a bit odd shaped.

So so much stuff, and so so little time, only 6 weeks... But things are moving, sales are continuing for the guitars and other stuff.. The Bike will be gone at the weekend (sob!!). We need to put big items on Marktplaats or arrange for the town seconnd hand store, the kringloop to come and clear out the larger items to sell in the 2nd hand stores... by... the 19th of Dec... Thats our current target date.
Some things just have to go to the junk pile or on offer to students and neighbours for free.... but we still have a solid month of hard selling we can do.

Sale is still dependant on mortgage of course but its unlikely to be a problem, so the buyers hope to complete on the 19th... we have to vacate the house by then and will book a hotel for 4 nights somewhere till we can get our flight on the 23rd... Tuesday flights ar considerbly cheaper than other days.... I don't know why.

As soon as I have my visa (applied yesterday online) we will book the flights and start the count down.

Exciting and also quite terrifying... but needs to be done. Wanna buy a fridge?

Ahthankyew

New PC... kinda

My old PC, the Beast sadly is not longer up to the job, its BSoD'ing every hour or 2, and more worringly it can no longer support the main tools I use for updateing the website and preparing videos for the upcoming book release date.

So I had to fork out on a new PC, just weeks before we head to Thailand... Thats not great as we'll almost certainly have to ship it to ChiangMai and pay duty on it, if it ever actually gets there in my lifetime,

So as a compromise, I have bought a little cute 4inx4in mini PC. The Pigmy, Its no where near as powerful as the Beast, and lets be honest that was ancient and sluggish by modern standards. But it does run Windows 11 which the Beast could not, and all my apps now work again.

So for 200 quid or so, for 6 weeks I have working, though slow,  equipment again to finish things up here and it can go in my cabin bag when we fly to CM.  Where I will promptly buy myself anoother mega beast to last me 10 years...The Pigmy, can then be put to use as a media server or something similar.

Its taken the day to get things on it working, like the twin screens, sound, netword, basic software tools I use, transferring files and so on, but its here and working so... onward.

Ahthankyew

More heartbreak...

Yup another sale.... the mighty Shadow... didn't get close to what I was asking but the guy who is buying her was very clear and honest about all the faults it had, not just the choke cable. He pointed out clearly a long list of small but costly things that needed doing, and I had to accept that I wasn't going to get the top price.

But on the plus side, he's not buying her for parts.. He's going to strip her down, rebuild her, better, stronger and faster, as a present for his wife's upcoming 50th.. So she's going to go to a good home with someone who knows how to give her the mechanical love I simply don't possess.

It was a tricky sale given that its a cold wet day and I couldn't even get her to start, with no choke,  but he was ok with that. I'll put her under cover with a heater to dry her out and get her starting up so he can come and collect her and drive her to her new home in a week or so.

So, one more tick on the list of things to sell off.. Heartbreaking as it is to let her go, I was never going to be able to keep her.

A few more guitars need to get sold tool, hopefully someone is looking for christmas presents.

Anyone want to buy a low milage Kia?

Ahthankyew

We have a date

Sale is going ahead, so far so good.. of course some things can still go wrong, or get delayed, but its all pretty much moving forward. Got the draft contract and dates for different legal points.

If all goes to plan......................we will see..... if all goes to plan we transfer on the 19th Dec, so we can set flights for as soon after that as we can.

We're on our way.

Ahthankyew

Fingers Crossed

We have another interested buyer... we have agreed a price, its not quite what we were asking but close enough to let us fund things, so now we wait for them to move forward and sort out a notaris and arrange their finance.

But as we saw with the last one, things can change, they may decide somewhere else is more for them, or that the area isn't as nice as they thought or... a hundred different things.

I'm not going to get super super excited like I did last time as it was crushing when the 1st bidders pulled out, but this seems more solid. If we can finalise the legals, we will be on our way "home" to Thailand very soon.

fingers very very almost painfully crossed.

Ahthankyew

Another missed flight?

Well... nearly, so so near..

We got a flight from Chiang Mai CNX to BKK at 21.00 arriving 22.00 given our flight out of BKK was at 23.50 that gave us a comfortable 1h.50m to get ourselves out of the domestic terminal to  the international...

We took that flight rather than an afternoon flight as it was the only one that actually allowed us to take some luggage with us. We planned to bring our suitcases back,  albeit mostly empty since we have a house now we left a lot of what we brought there for our return. We were unable to fold our big canvas bag into the hard large suitcase, so we just put our carry on in the hard case

great planning

yes... great planning,  was proud of that.

yes...great

And I wasn't too worried that when we got to  CNX with time to spare, to discover it was 15 mins delayed... no problem.

That is until the delayed 15 mins, didn' t update and it was still not boarding... in fact it was over 30 mins delayed

hmm still ok though

But we didn't take off for a while...didn't record the time

But we got to BKK and our 1.50 margin had slipped to  40 mins....oh shit

And we had baggage to collect....which ddn't show up until 10-15 mins later....

I sense  you're getting the idea now... my nice buffer got eaten away, and BKK is a HUGE airport

We had to get to the International terminal, drop off our luggage and we had now less than 30 mins

We moved as quickly as we could to get the the terminal, and  mean the full, scuse me please, coming through, we're late, sorry sorry, please let us through type of moving as fast as we could and we made it to departures, only to find Gate F....bag/check-in, closed.

FFFFFFUUUUCKKKKK not again.

We were checked in on line, but we needed to drop the bag, Jirawan asked several bored looking attendants  on other desks, if there was anyone from the air line to help but nope, they all said to send the luggage back via an office somewhere the other end of the lounge (when I say lounge I mean 1km square of desks) ...we did find it eventually but Jirawan was unable to get hold of her cousin to ask him to take care of this (he works in the airport).

tick tock....

So we were screwed, but Jirawan had a brilliant idea.. The big case only really contained our carry on bag which had a toilet bag and some change of clothes in it... take out the carry on case, and dump the suitcare...

So we did, we left the case in the airport and run like mad to get to the other side of Bangkok to get to the S120 gate that our flight left from.,...10 mins left.... queues, security, passport and other obsticles in our way... face scan entrance on doors didn't work...had to go to scan passport doors, etc.. oh of course security had another queue, and some of Jirawans creams and tubes caught security attendion for an extra delay... arrhhh

Scanning passport system however was really quick, so we got to run as fast as we could to....a shuttle train....oh gawd... 5 mins

The train can't be rushed, but it got there.... time was up... we were in negative time mode, we could only hope there was a delay...we had little to no chance of catching it, but we still ran as fast as we could carrying the small case, laptop bag and purses as fast as we could, at the top of the S gate escalator we saw 2 staff members holding Austrian Airlines Vienna last call cards...oh thank fuck.. yes yes, us... we're here we were delayed... after checking our boarding passes on our phones, they radioed the gate and took my arm to head there,  then she said those horrible words, can you run?

No... no, I am totally spent now.. but l will go as fast as I can.. Jirawan took the lead and ran with her while I tried to catch a 2nd , no 4th wind.... and jogged on as best I good, we stll had 400-500m to get to the gate... I did manage to increase speed from 2km/h go 2.5 and we almost all 3 of us go there together to face the 4 staff on the gate waving us to hurry......ermm we're doing our best

Passports please, and residence card.... oh shit my card is in wallet in the bottom of my laptop bag.... Jirawan had hers, I said please, my passport is UK so its ok, (it usually is) do you really need mine... yes yes we.....oh no just go...

phew...  go go go quick, through the gate, down the stars, up the ramp, and finally into the air craft where the stewards were clearly waiting to close the door...

WE MADE IT... 

We actually made it... I can't believe it, we got on, sweating like piglets, red face, heavy breathing, immnent heart failure and sat down...oh my ....we made it.

The flight was not the most comfortable though, but we made it to Vienna, where there was far less hassle getting onto the connecting flight to Amsterdam, but it was also delayed about an hour... due to weather
Get to Amsterdam, and...the trains were all delayed...

But we go the train.... we got to Breda, we got home.

What... a nightmare... the time in CM was amazing, the journeys there and back however... unreal.

Now we wait to see what possible refunds/compensation we can get back for the 1st flight.

One thing though that is so abundantly clear, is how little help there is for passengers who turn up late due to curcumstances they have no control over... twice that trip we arrived at an airport check-in late, through no fault of our own and there's no help available at all... its terrifying.  While I was totally overwhelmed with fuccckkkkkk it thoughts Jirawan's brilliant idea gave us a fighting chance to catch the plane... even if it cost us a nice suitcase and a potential heart attack.

I hope that will be the last time we ever had to go through  this, and the lesson is allow for at least 4 hours delays and get to the air port as early as possible....mad.

Ahthankyew