Last week when our car broke down in the middle of a cull zone over a hundred miles from home, it was a bit of a blow, thankfully we have a decent recovery plan (we seem to be getting good value from it as it was only £45 for the year and we've been ferried home three times in the last 9 months!!) and the vehicle was dropped off at the garage around midnight.
A friendly face was waiting and took us home, a couple of days later the garage informed us the issue was something that had been previously fixed so we were covered by the warranty, and told it would take a week, we asked for the vehicle to be put through the MOT at the same time as it was due the end of this month.
We hired a small car for just under £100 and have used that this week, clocking up a fairly low cull mileage week of just under 600 miles.
We returned the hire car today and picked up our car today from the garage and it passed the MOT with flying colours, a few small bits of work and the total cost was thankfully only £200.
We've spent a lot of money on this vehicle this year and were very nervous there might be something very expensive on the MOT so this is a huge relief for us to be back on the road and not be worrying about a huge bill.
We've spent money on batteries for a number of projects INCLUDING our thermal imaging camera that will get mounted on our drone, hopefully in the next few days.
Our biggest ongoing cost is always fuel, having a 4x4 was a difficult choice as we knew it was going to be more expensive, but when you need to drive down a byway at 2am and the road disappears into a muddy potholed track, it is reassuring to know nothing is going to stop you from making it through. It also means when we drive around cull zones, shooters often don't assume we are "anti", appearances can be deceptive!

Thank you everyone for your donations, we couldn't do the work we do without them, if you have donated before Tuesday of this week and not recieved your enamel badge can you please email us or message us on the facebook "stop the cull" page.

kind regards
STC