There are days when nothing goes right, and there are days when everything goes right.

Saturday was the former, today seems to be the latter so far. (Well, apart from this morning’s little incident when Ellie and her bicycle were reversed over by a blind muppet in a battered Mercedes – but that’s minor, right? No damage, no injury, at any rate.)

We were sat in the van on Saturday evening, watching a TV programme we’d brought with us on the laptop, when suddenly the screen went black. The sound continued, but nothing at all on the screen. Turn it off, turn it back on – and still nothing on the screen. The video controller seemed to have died. A little bit more testing confirmed it – and I knew the laptop was out of warranty. Oh. Expensive fix, on a four year old laptop with an iffy battery and a DVD drive that doesn’t work either? Or a new laptop? This, of course, was the day after ordering an eye-wateringly large and expensive stack of parts for the van to be delivered to us…

A quick google on the campsite’s own computer found that it was a known problem – and there was an extended warranty available for all affected machines. After calling Dell’s technical support (in Italy – which made for some amusing attempts at phonetic spelling), they’ve agreed to collect it, fix it and return it to us – all under the warranty!

Whilst I was on the phone to them, Ellie decided that she’d have a check of the other laptop – which hasn’t been switching on since Portugal. To be honest, we nearly ditched it several times… It only went and worked, didn’t it? And that, dear reader, means that we can finally bring you the long lost text of our Lisbon post!

(However, we’re without any photos of Cefalu until the other laptop comes back, so that post’ll be a bit delayed.)