Dan and Cleo were off early in the morning to make a court date so I retreated from Air Force One and snuggled under the covers of my van for a lazy sleep in. I was alone for the first time since Kevin arrived. I used my isolation to snooze in and out of sleep listening to the water lapping at the banks of the lake and to the birds coming and going on the water. I made it out of bed after 9am, not really sure of what to do first! I was hungry, wanted a shower and also wanted to organise my van before doing anything. I did a mixture of all of that in a funny order but eventually I was fed, clean and sitting under the shade of a tree writing away. That’s where I remained for the entire morning. My only company was a few fishing boats that didn’t come into the cove but I could hear the voices of their operators carry over the still water.

Next on the day’s to-do list was to tackle my disfigured roof rack. I didn’t quite know how I was going to fix it but I had to pull it all apart anyway, so I started there. When taking the solar panel off, I discovered that it was hanging on by only one nut and bolt, which was loose, while the other three bolts were nowhere to be seen. Whoops, lucky! Thankfully I had a few spare nuts and bolts that I could use as replacements but I shall definitely stop in at a Home Depot and invest in some Loctite to stop that happening again since the consequences would have been messy.

There was no way I could bend the roof rack pipe back into shape so I decided to swap the pipes front to back so that the bend would be at a point where it wasn’t taking much load. Easy enough, but it meant undoing a lot of bolts, taking the solar panel completely off the roof and detaching all the wiring. It was a nice sunny day at least so perfect weather to be working on the car. I did another round of liquid nails on the rack stands to stop them moving around and had the whole lot back together after a few hours. Midway through, I was shocked to see a boat right up in my cove! There was one man standing at its front fishing. We started chatting, him with his trawling motor pushing him gently around and me standing in all sorts of positions in and on the car. James was a fishing pro of thirty years and he had the tan to prove it. It was also a career that had ruined his marriage but at the same time given him great pleasure. He was keen to show me his only catch for the day, a wide-mouth sea bass. I feel like he didn’t get the impression I was suitably impressed since I know nothing about fish. We chatted away while each of us went about our business but I declined when he invited me onto his boat for a pork dish and some Fosters. Soon enough, he motored softly away, without any blessings from the depths of my little cove.

I was happy to finally tighten the roof rack straps and mount the bike on the roof. After giving it a good shake, I was satisfied it would hold for at least the next six months (since it had already served that much time). There was still some time left in the day so I decided to have a crack at fixing the wheel hub cover that had shaken itself loose of the front left wheel. I jacked the car up only to discover that there was a problem with the cover that would require a few screws. Since my drill battery had died, I decided to give it away and relax for the rest of the afternoon.

Just as I was packing up, Dan rolled up in his van with one less side rail than he had before. He’d gotten a flat tyre coming in to camp a few hours before and it had been an epic to get the spare on since he’d been on an incline and all the weight was on his flat. Even better, the spare was pretty much flat so it had been very slow going after he’d got it fixed. He looked like he’d been in the wars with grease and gunk marks all over his arms. He’d definitely had a more eventful day with me. Cleo was happy to be back at camp.

I’d done a few sessions of firewood collecting throughout the day, making use of my new hatchet that I’d bought during my last Walmart shop, beating the shit out of a dead stump to get some dry wood. With that and the pallet that Dan had nicked from a Home Depot, we were set for the night. It was Dan’s turn to cook so we had salad for entrée and Bratwurst over the grill for dinner. We picked up where we left off the night before, sitting around the fire talking until it was too cold to stay out anymore. We played a couple of rounds of cards in Air Force One, playing a game I hadn’t tried before in which I got beaten, after which we went to bed in the Astro. Dan’s van was better for cards but mine took the cake for sleeping. While lying in bed, Cleo made a rucus outside when she got to the last two sausages that we hadn’t eaten. In getting to them, she managed to knock over my steady table. From the van it looked like one of the legs had broken. All we could see when we shone a torch on the scene of the crime was Cleo’s two eyes glowing back at us, guilty as sin.