DSB replied on 28/08/2023 09:38
Posted on 28/08/2023 09:38
Some of you may have read elsewhere that out car 'died' whilst at our daughters in the Outer Hebrides, and we had to be recovered home.. Fortunately we have Green Flag/ Mayday cover and they sorted us out I thought it might be useful to give an account of how things panned out.
We started to lose power in the car on the journey up. The car began to lose power at Fort William. We drove on to Spean Bridge and pulled over to call Mayday/ Green Flag, just the other side of Spean, at 1am, in tbe pouring rain, with no lights, cars, houses anywhere in sight. The local garage got to us and checked out the car as best as possible. He seemed to tbink the problem was a sensor (to do with air flow/ mixture). He disconnected something and told us to get the sensor replaced when we got to Lewis. We did this ourselves when we arrived (easy job).
Unfortunately, this didn't solve the problem, so we tried several garages on Lewis ourselves. No-one could do anything for us for 4/5 weeks, except one garage who agreed to take a look. After various tests/ diagnostics he reckoned it was a cracked manifold (its plastic on the Discovery 4), but he couldn't do more/ repair in the time we had. Our only option was to contact Mayday/ Green Flag again for recovery home at the end of our stay.
Our ferry crossing for the journey home was last Thursday morning, so this is what happened. The Green Flag assigned us a 'co-ordinator' to sort it for us.
Wednesday afternoon: Car picked up and transported from our daughters house on Lewis, down to the Ferry port. We followed in the daughters car to pick up the keys and return to daughters for overnight stay.
Thursday: borrowed daughters car to get to ferry port (she picked up the car later). Drove my car onto the ferry (in limp mode) and off the other side. Another tow truck was waiting at the ferry port on Skye. They dropped of a hire car for us so we could travel home and took away my car to transport home in stages.
Friday: we arrived home in the hire car.
Saturday: dropped off the hire car to their unit in Tamworth
Monday (today): phone call from Green Flag to let us know that the car would be arriving at the garage here tomorrow.
Problems we had to overcome: The recovery firm could only recover the car to the port on the Wednesday and neither the Green Flag or ourselves could find a taxi firm to take us to Tarbert from our daughters at the time we needed so she volunteered the use of her car. Also, after the recovery vehicle had taken my car from the ferry port on Skye, it took us the first 20 minutes to work out how to 'work' all the different settings and buttons on the hire car. An instruction maunal might have been useful
The only cost to us was the fuel we put in the hire car. Not sure if I can claim that back, but I would have paid fuel costs anyway. On the whole, we were pleased and really thankful with the service from the Green Flag. It was never going to be a straightforward recovery from the Outer Hebrides - I don't know what we would have done without them. Just thankful we were not towing the caravan!!
David
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DSB
Caravanner from Staffordshire