Wednesday; the call had been received from the shipping agent yesterday saying that Jane’s 3 trailers had cleared customs and were ready for collection, though all the tyres were flat as The loader in theUK had to lower the trailer heights to get them into a container. Now at this point you are asking, why did Jane want 3 horse trailers here in Abu Dhabi, well quite simply, firstly they are very hard to find, and if any are for sale, they are very expensive. Importing one seemed the way forward but this meant hiring a container. The cost of the container is the same if it has 1 trailer in or 3 so it seemed a good idea to bring 3 out and sell 2; hence 3 trailers, and re-coup the shipping costs.
So after Jane’s normal morning routine of delivering Dave to work, visiting Herbie and walking the dogs we set off, firstly we had to buy a tyre pump and as we had 12 tyres to pump up; we needed a 12 volt, electric and powerful one so we went to this Amazing shop called “Ace”, what you couldn’t buy there was probably not made, they sold everything.
So armed with pump and paperwork, we set off for Dubai, arriving an hour or so later to meet the agent outside a convenient hotel so that we could follow him to his warehouse. 20 minutes later we arrived at an industrial estate, it was a good job we followed him as I think we would still be looking for it now!!!
We took the new pump from the box, read the instructions, connected to car battery, though this was a “hunt the thimble” process in itself. You would think a car battery is large enough to see normally, but not on a Porsche Cayenne, it is nowhere to be seen so after consulting the hand book, we found 2 special connectors for the pump’s crocodile clips to connect. Right, we connected the pipe to the first tyre and off we went. In the shop we were told this pump should inflated a normal car tyre up in about 4 minutes. After about 20 minutes the first tyre was up to 20 psi, they needed to be pumped to 54 psi, so by our reckoning another eleven and a half tyres to go, this would take us a further 6 hrs! I went back and re read the instructions and we had carried them out to the letter, oh dear! I then looked into the original bag and found a round, silvery thing and thought what was this. I took it apart and it was a filter, nothing mentioned in the instructions! I took it back to the pump itself and found a hole with a rubber bung in it, I took the bung out, screwed the filter into the hole that now appeared, switched on and hey presto, 4 minutes later 1 tyre was pumped up to 54 psi.
Well Within the hour all 12 tyres were pumped hard and we were ready to go.
The arrangements were simple, we would take the first trailer around to Jane’s friends house in Dubai for storage until we could collect (or sell) it, this went without a hitch. We had arranged with a car hire company to collect the second trailer and take it to another friend’s house, this time in Abu Dhabi. Well the chap turned up with a large 4×4 but no tow bar, can you believe it, they agreed, at a price, to tow the trailer but he didn’t realise he needed a tow bar, can you believe it!!!!! To make things worse it didn’t seem to. Dawn on him something was wrong! We sent him packing though he said he would return in the morning, with a tow bar, and deliver as agreed. By now we were running late, hungry and we would not be back in time to collect Dave from work.
Ok, we connected the last trailer onto Jane’s car and set off. A quick “pit stop” en route for fuel both for the car and us, and back on our way. 2 hours later we had delivered Jane’s trailer to her stables then back home. The total time spent was about 10 hours, we were very glad to get home, though this still left the vexing question, would the man and car, collect the trailer left behind tomorrow!