Time to go home ... Outside it has been very cold for days.
We shovelled the snow away from the drive way, and Alan, Chris and I cleared our cars/ van of the loose snow picked up (blown in) over night. I left the van running to warm it up, an loaded the kit in.
Then the van spluttered and stopped ... It refused to start again .. Leaving it for a while, as we completed packing up and emptying the apartment.
Trying again . .. nothing .. there was no fuel getting through and it finally dawned on me that the fuel had waxed up in the cold... we tried using a hair dryer on the fuel lines, but no improvement.
Finally I resorted to calling the AA 5* service I had religiously signed up to each year, the last time I had used it was for the windscreen wipers a few years ago. They gave me an estimated time in 2 hours ... we sat and waited ... nothing.. and then more nothing. Alan , and Linda had left, but Chris and M-J hung around to see what they could do to help.
So to try and resolve it ourselves, I popped down to the local garage where there was a person doing things in the back. He came around to have a look, and added an additive, told us to wait and see ... it started, ran for five minutes then stopped again. We tld Chris and M-J to leave us to sort it out, and get off.
We dragged him around again, and he got it going then drove it down to the garage, where he blew out the fuel filter and the tank lines, before reconnecting it ... I suspect that at this time he damaged the connectors to the fuel filter, which had a complex manner of connections and a feedback circuit to warm the fuel incomer. After much messing around, he gave in and fitted a tractor fuel filter ... this had to be primed by cranking the engine hard each time it stopped, but it worked.
We drove home gingerly, expecting the bodge to break at any-time. But it survived and we got back with few issues, other than having to negotiate a later ferry.
We never did get the AA 5* rescue .. if the garage owner had not been around we would have been stranded for a long time.