We went back to Almaty (Kazakhstan) to take care of the house and cat of friends while they were in Germany for their holidays. For us this was perfect to clean and maintain Rosinante’s camping cabin.
First of all we emptied the whole cabin and cleaned it a crazy lot. Some parts of the carpet we had to clean with bleach to remove moldy or strong dirt. I was not a big fan of bleach but in the end, when living for so long in a small cabin, it is like a magical cleaner.
Again, we had a look at everything we had and sorted everything in a keep, maybe and a give away pile.
And we washed almost everything we had.
After the cleaning, we bought Rosinante a nice anti-rust treatment for most of the metal parts of the frame, rear bumper, wheel suspension etc. This is her after cleaning .
And this with the new protection.
The guy who did it was a recommendation of the Startroopies (friends of ours) and we felt he did a good job for 400€.
After that we put everything back inside and it went very well. Letting go of some stuff absolutely helped. Especially because we wanted to keep the snowboards inside the driver’s cabin to protect them from the weather etc.
Our heating and air condition blower started to make disturbing noises and so we went to car city in Almaty to get a new one.
And the new and stronger coil springs for Rosinante’s rear suspension, which we had sent to a Kazakh friend, arrived and we mounted them by ourselves. And the handling of Rosinante, which never had been bad, improved a lot.
After cleaning Rosinante, I had my teeth cleaned.
And Racki got some Hannibal Lector treatment.
This was the crazy cat we were sitting. She was super cute and very, very much attached to humans. Every morning at around 4 o’clock she came in our bed and woke us up by lying down around or on our heads. And if we ignored this, she started biting our feet until we fed her and let her out of the house.
One advantage of a house: an oven for casserole and french fries. It was really nice to live in a house for these three weeks but living in Rosinante was always nicer.
The last day, we cleaned everything we used and when I was cleaning the shower bath, the holding for the shower gels fell off the wall and smashed the shower faucet. I got pretty pissed. Especially because I knew our friends would come back the next day and I imagined that it would not be so nice to come home with a kid and having no shower or bath. Because of the insurance, we did not try to repair it. In the end, we found a temporary solution in using a hose we were about to trash.
We did a very nice hike with Maria and her dog Vedinger.
The snow was pretty deep. Sometimes even waist deep and so we had to fight through it.
Vedinger had to fight as well but enjoyed it a lot.
And of course we went out with our friends.
One night we visited a “gay bar”. It was good fun.
And on one of our last nights in Almaty we had a proper farewell party.