[AlainBrighton]

I have been reading your thread with a lot of pleasure and interest today ! From the whole discussion about getting a high mileage car that hardly has time to get a cold engine compared to diesel cars that were just used to drive to the supermarket 2 miles away and people still insist it is better to buy a car with a few miles ..... all the way through to the washers (being a Dutch native speaker I initially was under the impression this had to do with the headlight washers or windscreen wipers :-( ) the navigation issues as well as the trust one has to put in indies but with the knowledge of the whole forum behind you "to keep them honest", the family addition to the final remarkable fact a forum member can point you out in the right direction when you see a warning which could spell all kinds of disaster. Quite an odyssey in itself and congratulations on your family expansion.

Very interested as I want to give my honest 05 XC70 a slight break and put a 11-14 XC70 next to it, or a X3 or 3 touring x drive. And suddenly thinking about a XC90 reading this. I was wondering (having read about astronomical costs of running how a XC70 would compare to a XC90 in running costs ? I pay £350 for my insurance, £325 for my road fund licence (which is about 20-25% of the costs if it had a Dutch license plate so a doddle) £160 a year to park the car in the center of Brighton about 200 yards from the sea and wonder if these costs would be doubled with a XC90 ?

Furthermore you wrote somewhere you would like to give the "burn-it-yourself" navi discs a go if you had some ....... whilst still clearing the 10000 odd books in my dad's 2 studies in the Netherlands I have come across quite a stash of DVD-Rs so let me know how many you need and I can pick them up and post them your way or drop them off on one of my trips to Cambridge and Norfolk if that would help you experiment and as such helping other members of this forum with your newly gained experience.

Good luck with your sinum currus :-)