This 24 hour period was about travel and it was about disappointingly frustrating banking and technology. The plane flight was good! Meal, flat bed, sleep! Reckon I punched out 💤💤 for about 8 hours.
On landing it was a loooong walk through the airport and a seemless exit through customs. And now the fun and games began! The car hire place was not at Heathrow and the instructions were to simply jump on the Hotel Hoppa bus to get there. This involved a major wrestle with a very stupid lift, a sniff of dismay that the wait for the Hoppa was 20 minutes, that it cost £6.80 each and they didn't accept cash and that it went to 6 different hotels before ours.
And now came the really revolting bit. I had reservations about the car hire arrangement - it involved a third party booking entity as well as the Italian-based car hire company Drivalia. I read everything I could about the hire conditions - they were very particular in their requirements but I got everything ready and all was good UNTIL my credit card transaction was declined. From there everything rapidly went south. It's too soon for me to re-live the hideous 3 hours that followed, but suffice to say I was not a happy camper and Dad was considerably out of pocket by the time we drove off.
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| Looks can be deceiving. |
Total crappy intro to the UK, but surprisingly not through the fault of the car hire place, nope - it was my Australian ING bank that let me down - we have since had words 😠
Anyway - once we finally got the car (which by the way is a gutless vauxhall corsa that Dad can barely get into and that has the weirdest, most insipid gears I've ever come across) it was smooth sailing up to Billesdon in Leicestershire to stay 5 nights with Mum and Dad's friend Chris.
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