Am I becoming too German?

I mentioned before that, while we have a bike carrier, we had never assembled it, mounted it or driven with it.

Now, despite being an excellent scout - bronze, silver and gold arrows and an armful of proficiency badges - I'm not really known for being prepared, tending to trust to luck, probably more often than I shoud. But the thought of driving down to France with the bikes kicked me into action.

The first thing I did was to assemble the carrier. In the cellar. In secret so that no-one would see my mistakes. The start of much swearing over the terrible quality of the handbooks. IKEA guides are infamous, but car handbooks are so much worse! As it turns out, I didn't have too many problems and only had to redo a couple of sections.

Once it was assembled I had to get a licence plate and then, gulp, mount it on the car. Fell at the first hurdle: where's the towbar? Fortunately, my friend Wolfgang suggested where it might be - under the false floor in the boot.

I then studied the car handbooks many times, many, many times, without really understanding anything and realised, I'd probably have to crawl under the car a couple of times before I understood. My brother Johnny used to say: everything is hard until it becomes easy - but it shouldn't have to be this hard!

I'm glad to say that this approach of breaking it down into sections and repeating them seems to have paid off. We're both more confident with the carrier and how to mount it, the bikes and connect the electrics. Astrid's even driven with it a bit and we'll be driving all the difficult bits, which is normally the case anyway. I can drive, but as I don't do it very often, I tend to have to relearn a lot of things every time. But I'm okay on the motorway for a couple of hours!