Tag: car issues

Fixing Rosinante in the darkest car garage (October 2023)

It was pretty wet and got colder in Georgia and we started to use Rosinante’s diesel heater.

In Sveri I noticed that the connection of the cable connecting the starter battery in Rosinante’s engine bay with the charging booster in the cabin was broken. Without fixing it we were not able to charge the batteries in the cabin while driving. And our solar panel was not strong enough to compensate our electricity needs.

So we went to the next bigger town Kutaisi and searched for a car garage that was willing to lift the cabin from our pickup.

At one point I really got annoyed! We asked two garages with a four-point-car-lift to lift our cabin from the pickup but they refused because they never did something like that. That felt absolutely German to me and I got pissed.

After continuing our search we drove into an old hangar. It was absolutely dark in there. We needed Rosinante’s headlights to drive into it and searching for a mechanic. We found a very nice and helpful guy who lifted the cabin and never got tired of assisting us.

In the photos the place seems to be not very dark but it was. It felt like working underground and we were thinking how it must be to work in that dark all day.

Thor is alive again (August 2023)

After the climbing, we went back to Batumi to get Thor (Racki’s car) back from the car garage.

The mechanic really made him running again we were so happy!

Although it had cost a whole lot of money. I think it was around 1000 Euro for cleaning injectors and replacing some parts of the fuel pump.

But we were happy about Thor’s resurrection and continued with two cars.

These car garages in Georgia were very funny. This one was repairing cars and brewing Chacha.

Lovely mechanics, finding a car garage for a Peugeot Boxer and reuniting old friends (August 2023)

Before I got Rosinante, I had been living in a huge Pössl (a big transporter transformed into a camper by a well known company).

For my world journey/ nomadic life I switched into Rosinante because I thought it’s a good idea to have a stronger, robust, medium off-road capable car which can be repaired everywhere. And it turns out that all the car travelers are pretty right: it gets very complicated to find spare parts and mechanics in a lot of countries. So I’m happy with having chosen a Toyota Hilux which got sold most over the world by one of the companies with the best service and spare part network.

But with Thor, Cindy’s camper van it was very different. For weeks he did not start. Tegeta, the biggest car service company in Georgia, did not find the issue and said that they are not familiar with Peugeot Boxers. But they made an appointment in a second garage. The guy there was too afraid to deal with an unknown car and postponed the appointment again and again.

So we asked everybody we asked Facebook groups, a whole lot of garages we found online and everybody we knew in Georgia, for help. In the meantime Zdenko had started working in a super nice hostel and the husband of the owner said he would help us. He was so lovely and helpful! One day he drove us from car garage to car garage explaining Thor’s issue to the mechanics again and again, not getting tired of it.

Together we went to Tegeta to talk again with the mechanics there. Especially one mechanic there had helped us so much and when the husband of Zdenko’s boss met him there was a big surprise: they were very good friends from the past and had not seen each other for more than ten years! They had lost contact and were now happy to be reunited again. It was awesome!

Before we left Tegeta another mechanic gifted us a wonderful, little wooden heart because we had so much trouble with Cindy’s car and they could not fix it.

Together with the two reunited friends we brought Thor to the third garage. This time with an appropriate towing truck. The guy at this third garage was optimistic that he would fix Thor.