Our last day on the campsite in West Sussex today and we are heading back to Calcutt Boats hopefully to pick up Merlin. We had breakfast and packed the van and set off. I drove today to give John a rest and also to get used to driving the van. We made good progress up the motorway until we reached the M25 we hit traffic for a few miles. We then turned onto the M40 and the van started to vibrate a lot. We pulled over and John noticed that one of the tyres had blown and the wires were sticking out. We rang the RAC and patrol man Andy came to our rescue. He put our spare tyre on but then told us that this tyre was not very good either so he felt that it would be unsafe for us to continue our journey. He then kindly escorted us to the services at junction 8a and then arrange for two new tyres to be fitted. He waited with us until the fitter arrived and even stayed with our vehicle whilst we walked the dogs and got some refreshments. Excellent service thank you Andy.
A very helpful mobile tyre fitter came from The Mobile Tyre Company based in Banbury named Adz. Very profession and efficient service. If we lived near Banbury we would certainly use him again especially as we will need to replace the back two tyres at some point.
We needed to be at Calcutt Boats before 5pm so this delay meant that we would not get there in time so we decided to stay in the services for the night. However after considering a night on the van without electric and full of all our camping equipment we decided to treat ourselves to a night in the Ramada hotel as it was dog friendly.
Once the tyres were fitted we checked into the hotel and then went to the Pizza Express for food and then back to the hotel to enjoy a bottle of red wine.
Hopefully tomorrow we can get to Calcutt to collect Merlin.
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