Just a few more days of our housesit to go and we’ve really enjoyed it here.

Mike has put extra house batteries in so we now have 200amh, when before we only had 64. so more than 3 x as much. We then decided we needed more solar to charge such a big power bank so we ordered two more 100w solar panels, so we now have 400w of solar on the roof.

Our housesitting hosts came back from Scotland for a couple of days, so we headed off to explore the area. We went to Mystic, a quaint seaside town, and also to Rhode Island, which isn’t actually an island. We ate traditional Connecticut food such as clam cakes, seafood chowder, and some deep fried clams.

When we got back to our housesit, Chris had prepared a spread of New England delicacies for us to try. Steamers were first on the menu. They are basically pipi’s which are steamed open, then dipped in a delicious broth, where you jiggle it a bit to get the sand out, then dipped into melted butter. Delicious.

We also had quahogs, which is mix of minced clam, chorizo, breadcrumbs, some spices, served in a half clam shell. They were delicious and are common in the region.

For the main course we had home grown pork chops, local corn, roasted veggies from the garden and caramelised onion. We were very spoilt.

Over the last 3 days we’ve both been feeling tired with headaches and body aches. We’d wonder if our hosts had brought a bug back on their flight from Scotland. We both felt terrible, like a mild flu. I wondered if I’d had an unseen tick on me and was having a reaction to that, the aches in unusual places, and not letting up. Mike has just finished his antibiotics and wondered if it was something to do with that.

Other than extreme tiredness and aches, we felt fine, so wondered how long these symptoms were going to last.

As we were drinking our second cup of coffee this morning, we discovered the source of our flu-like symptoms.

Mike mentioned how he almost picked up the wrong coffee in the supermarket, saying the packaging is identical, just one different word on it. I thought I better check the packet, knowing mikes close-up eyesight isn’t great. I picked up the coffee packet and the source of our pain was revealed…

We’d been drinking decaf for the last few days!!! We quickly tipped it down the sink, made a proper coffee, and all was right with the world again!