There are no pics this week.

Danita and I planned to go to Greece in September. We wanted some extra time in Athens, so we arranged air tickets to arrive in Athens 2 days before the tour started. Last Sunday, I finally got aground to reserving the hotel room for those 2 days. About 6 hours after I locked that reservation in, the travel folks called to tell us they were cancelling the trip. I was *not* pleased. We’re working out what to do. One possibility is to use the airfare and the 2 day hotel stay as the beginning of our more-or-less self guided trip. We will pre-arrange local tours in combination with getting around on our own. It looks promising, thanks to our good friend Mr. Google.

Our Leaf was having a hard time getting out of the dealer’s repair shop. I requested a service loaner for us to pick up Monday and keep until our car was repaired. The dealership agreed. We got a brand new Sentra (with 1100 miles on it). It was kind of noisy and definitely less comfortable than our Accord, but it had some interesting features. One feature was adaptive cruise control, which I didn’t notice until I was driving to the dealer to return the loaner. I had the cruise control set. The traffic in front of me slowed down, but I never had to hit the brakes because my car slowed to keep pace. It felt very strange. Its performance was flawless, but in that short drive I never felt I could trust it. The other feature was a lane-change warning. If I turned on the signal to switch lanes and there was another car too close in that lane, it would flash and beep to warn me of a possible collision. This sounds like a way cool and very useful feature, but it quickly got irritating. When changing lanes around here, it’s often necessary to kind of push your way into the other lane. The bleeping beeper went off too often.

You might have noticed I just wrote about driving the loaner back to the dealer. Yes, that means our Leaf was declared leak-free. It’s sitting in our garage right now. I took it out in a rain yesterday. It came back as dry as a fine Cabernet.

With the Leaf leak plugged and some interesting options on the trip to Greece, things are beginning to turn around. We hope to have the other issues resolved before long, but I won’t tempt fate by pre-announcing success.

We only have one party this week — a neighborhood Italian potluck dinner this evening. Danita made lasagna. My goal is to get towards the front of the line so I can get a slice. There’s no charge for the potluck dinners, so they are BYOB. We have a nice bottle of Cabernet waiting and ready.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.