Making memories

A bit of a restless night with our body clocks out of whack, but we did get some sleep.

Our room at the Holiday Inn Express Room 228 is just lovely roomy and very comfortable plus breaky is part of it and only cost us $80 aus a bit over the budget but worth it after the huge haul!

We had our breaky, not bad for what we paid, a hot buffet. I tried a few more bits than normal and paid for it all day! This food business is going to be a challenge....
Our plan today is to pick up the hire car from Victoria stn.

1st step was to get back on the shuttlecock. Th Hotel, back to Terminal 5 to find the underground railway to get to Victoria Stn.....
John is finally realising that asking helps..... so we asked how to at Terminal 5 and yep it went like clockwork all the way! Even had to change trains at Hammersmith to the country line that took us right into the heart of London and Victoria Stn....

As we had no way of using our phones at this point we headed to Maccas to get the address of where the car was, John had left the paperwork at the hotel😭.
Well this turned out to be awhile but drama..... nothing goes to plan with us with the small things!
First step we learnt that the Sims from Singapore which were still in our phones can’t receive texts from Maccas here in UK....so we could look up the address... plus all correspondence was on. Our phones but as we could log onto net we could see anything as it wouldn’t down load! Next problem we couldn’t get the new sims out of the phones to put our old ones back in as we needed something like a paper clip to this we didn’t have.... the issue was we had to be at the hire car company by 12md it was now 5 mins too and we had given ourselves heaps of time! I had to head to the loo so while there gave it all to the Lord.... pls help us sort this mess out! While looking in the mirror at the loo I looked at my earrings and realised we could use them to take out our Sims..... Praise you Lord for the light bulb moment! We got the Sims out yep got the phones to work, so we thought we will call them to get the address.... by now we were both in panic mode thinking we would be charged a lot extra cause that is what the contract said! Little did we think about using the Maccas wifi once we got our sims in all we could think about was letting them know we didn’t have their address and a bit lost!

We called them yes all good.... set off to find them... turns out there are 3 big stations in Victoria 1 the underground, 2 the Express and 3 the Bus coaches Stn and yep you guessed it, it was the bus coaches so no way we would have known that, we could have been hopelessly lost for ages! But God is a wonderful God He does look after us in times of stress and we found the car hire place!

Then for the lesson.... as we were signing all the paperwork, I get a text fro Telstra to say we had just clocked up $100 on our ph, that quick call cost a fortune, what I did forget was when we got our Sims in Singapore you had to put Mibile Data on to get them to work, not sure why, but in my panic I forgot to turn it off when the old Sim went back in. When Joh checked it last night we discovered by the time we put in our UK Sims it had clocked up $185..... nothing we can do, I must have had something running in the background using data! I have looked to see what but can’t work it out! So note 2 to travellers make sure you always turn off your Mobile Data,I always do but in panic forgot momentarily and now we have to pay big time for a silly mistake!

On a lighter note we have a band new car upgraded as they didn’t have the one we booked, it’s a Volvo very smick and neat!

So as we could leave the car parked with Hertz we decided to head out and see some sights. A wanderer around and we found Westminster Abby and Parliament House , a pommy pub for bangers and mash share lunch, a huge March not sure why but seems it was a protest, hundreds of bobbies everywhere! A walk around St James park and yep Buckingham Palace! Some really lovely sights, amazing buildings both old and new!
On our way back we called into the Underground building where we saw a Vodophone shop after researching we decided in getting Vodophone Sims as they go over 50 countries in Europe and had a pretty good data deal.... so now we have UK phone numbers and can use our data without a huge Telstra bill!!

By the time we did all this it was nearly 5pm so we hot footed back to get our hire car, then figure out how to get back to our hotel....
When we signed all the paperwork, the guy asked us do we need a GPS, we said no we had our own, thank you very much.... he was going to charge extra if we said yes! The thing is now nearly all cars have Inbuilt GPS which is all part of the use of the car now a days, they really are shifty buggars, all about the $$$$$. But thank goodness it does have one as it as our way home.

Back safely on dark, it’s been a very cool miserable day weather wise no sun at all... A friend who has been travelling around the UK for the last 4 weeks told me they have had 3 days of sun in all that time! Ohh well we are in the UK....

Day over all our planning has come together now let the adventure begin!!!Read more