Jan 2: Surf lessons and Van breakdown number 2

I have never tried surfing. I've seen surfing in South Africa and Peru, but I've always been a little shy about learning. I guess we're all geared to guard against failure... especially the public variety. But with Mick and Oscar as the only other two people on the beach I agreed to have Oscar give me a private lesson. The only problem was that by the time the on-beach part of the lesson was over, most of the waves had passed.

We sure looked official in all our gear... but I think Oscar was the only one who managed to catch a wave or two before we had all swallowed enough seawater and decided to call it quits.

On the way home, our van, a 1978 Toyota Hiace pop top camper van, decided she wanted to have a little rest. On the way home from the beach, she stalled on a downhill. We pulled over and found ourselves in a similar predicament - unable to get her started. Our hero, the valiant Oscar plunged into the engine cavity headfirst again. We checked sparkplugs, we reconnected loose leads, and we banged on the airfilter some more. As we progressed, you could tell the battery was having some difficulty in turning over the starter... When she finally roared to life again, we wasted no time and made our way to a parts store to pickup a new distributor cap... hoping that it might help guard against future stops.