Day 6 -- Maison de la Foret and shopping in Point-a-Pitre
Thursday 2/26/2004
I woke up at 7:00 and drove down to the bakery to buy some bread. The car had a high idle as I drove it down. In starting the car at the bakery, the engine had to turn over several times. This might be related to the engine light we've got on the dash (since I picked up the car). When I got back to the bungalows, we disconnected the battery on the car, hoping it might clear whatever computer condition is causing this. It might also have gotten damp overnight. We ate breakfast. The car started fine, but the radio would not come on. This is one of those theft-clever things where you need to enter a code to activate the radio, in the event the battery is disconnected. And, of course, we did not know the code.
Today was Erik's first open water dive. Lilli went with Erik, to provide him some company on the boat, while I went with the others to Maison de la Foret, along the Traverse. This place offers many hikes in the rain forest, two which area very easy. We took the kids along the 1hr hike, which they sort of liked. There was a bit of whining. Once we got back to the cars, we stayed at the river for a while and the kids took a bath. I drove to pick up Lilli and Erik after his dive and we returned to the bungalows where Bengt was in the process of preparing one of his favorites: hamburgers and macaroni.
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| Louise finds big seeds in the bushes |
After we had eaten, Bengt and I went to town to do some shopping. The first thing on the agenda was to take care of the broken mirror. The actual front cover of the mirror could be salvaged and was cleaned off with a bit of tooth-paste. We first went to the Opel dealer and asked for a new mirror. It cost a whopping 70€ for the mirror and a little plastic part. Another man, who overheard us, told us there was a generic parts store just next door (Marimax). So we went there instead. It cost only 8.50€ for just a mirror glass. And that was all I needed. We spent a few minutes in their parking to replace the broken mirror. We then went over to Pro-Rent to change over Bengt's rental car to his credit card and to get my radio working again. At this point, the check engine light has not yet returned. So perhaps this was only a transient condition? Once done, Bengt and I drove over to Carrefour for food shopping. It probably took us 1 1/2 hour to get done. But we had a long list of supplies needed. The washing machine got repaired today. We were able to was our muddy clothes from a few days back. The machine seems to work fine now. We hung the clothes on a dry rack. It will probably take a while to get it dry since it is so humid.
When we got back (a bit late), we prepared spaghetti and meat sauce to everyone's liking. We then sat up and talked a bit.