21 May, 2024

A red-letter day today – will we sell the car this morning??

After a hearty breakfast we drive back to Stuart and Alexander’s Waves car wash situated in the nearby Tesco car park. I’d booked it in for 10:30 am but we arrive around 9:45 hoping to get it done earlier. No luck. So we head to Costas till we’re contacted that the car is ready around 11:15.

The Insignia cleans up well. It was nice to drive, had plenty of boot space for all our luggage but has not been a particularly reliable car – it probably had a hard life in Scotland before we bought it. Still, I find it hard to part with the car and I believe that we have improved the car since we bought it.

When we were staying with Barbaran and Stuart in Wokingham last February, Stuart suggested we contact their friend, Ian, to buy our car which, if successful, will be a god-send.

It should have been a 3-minute journey to Ian at Nirvana Car Sales in the Mulberry Business Park but it appears that works to the railway overpass is still ongoing (as it was 3 months ago in February) causing a long tailback extending as far as the Tesco roundabout, so we have to find an alternative route to cross the railway line to get to our destination.

While waiting for Ian to arrive, another car pulls into the car park and Lynn recognises the driver as being Alexander, Barbaran and Stuart’s eldest son. (The last time she saw Alexander and his younger brother, Niall, was in Wokingham when they would have been in primary school.) We introduce ourselves and have a bit of a chat.

Ian arrives at about 12:15 pm and we have all the sales paperwork completed, ownership transferred and the money in our account within the hour. Ian is indeed a pleasure to deal with and he saves us having to muck about with using one of the online commercial wholesale car buyers.

What a relief!

It’s only a 20-minute walk back to the hotel where we cancel the car insurance. Nice to know that we’ll get refunds of car tax and the balance of the insurance premium within the next couple of weeks.

Lynn settles into an afternoon of starting to catch up on 10 days of blog. We crack our final bottle of chilled champers to celebrate the car sale and in readiness for our hour’s Zoom call at 4:30 pm with Vicki who is back in Nerja at the moment. Her daughter, Sasha, arrived yesterday from uni in Glasgow so we get to catch up with her, too.

22 May, 2024

Waking early, we have an early breakfast then head out into the drizzle to walk to the train station to suss it out for our journey on Monday. It’s only an 8-minute walk, it will be the nearside platform and we buy 2x one-way tickets to Richmond at GBP15.30 each.

The town centre looked interesting when we drove through it on Monday so we walk towards Market Place checking out restaurants and pubs for tonight and where Lynn finds a Specsavers to repair the lens that keeps popping out of her specs and books a haircut for 2:00 pm.

While she’s there I catch up on a couple of reviews, sort out the photos for the past 10 days and buy some more travel insurance for the last leg of our 2-year European Grand Tour.

23-26 May, 2024

Lynn has taken 2 full days to add her bits to the blog. It’s been at least 10 days since we updated the blog so it’s understandable. This week was put aside to sell the car, do some catching up on things, get our luggage downsized for our 1st flight since Poland and rest up before our final 2-month drive around Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania starting with our flight to Helsinki next Tuesday. Are we down to 23kg for our checked baggage?

On the 24th Lynn walks around Wokingham old town and the next day she resorts to buying 2 items of summer clothing after she checks out the weather forecast for Estonia and realises that summer temperatures will be in the high 20s at least during our next 2 months’ tour.

Dinners this week have been almost exclusively at our hotel since the food is excellent and all at reasonable prices. We did, however, venture out to Rossini’s for Italian which was reasonable but no better than what Claudio has been cooking for us at the hotel.

27 May, 2024

Spring Bank Holiday today. We say goodbye to the Premier Inn staff who have been fabulous during our week stay here. We walk to Wokingham station, catch the 10:53 train to Richmond station.

The plan was to then catch the District Line to Turnham Green then swap to the Piccadilly Line to Heathrow Terminals 2&3.

A good plan but London Underground decided to close the District Line today without advising passengers on other lines. We therefore only find out that no underground trains are running from Richmond when we arrive. In any 1st world country buses would be substituted to go between the normal stops but this is the UK. We now have to take an overground train to Gunnersbury, then lug our suitcases up a long, high flight of stairs (too bad if you are in a wheel chair as there are no lifts) then find the rail replacement bus to Acton Town Station to rejoin the Piccadilly Line. So, instead of taking about 30 minutes from Richmond to London Heathrow it took us well over an hour. These guys couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery. Why the hell would they close the District Line on a long weekend at the start of school holidays? Mental midgets.

At least the Hilton Garden Inn is right at the Terminal 2 exit. It also has a coin-operated laundry (but not a swipe credit/debit card payment). If there is a more difficult way to do things the Poms will find and choose that way.

Paul and Susie are coming to the hotel this evening to meet us for drinks and dinner as it may be a few years before we see them again. I can’t see us heading to the UK again as I am all but over the traffic jams, the high costs, frustrating methodologies of the public service and general inefficiencies. The English make the French look civilised.

However, we have a lovely dinner and drinks with Paul and Susie and hopefully we have convinced them both to head over to Oz to stay with us for some time in the next couple of years.

Our flight to Helsinki is scheduled for 10:20 am tomorrow. It will be interesting to see how the Poms can make a simple flight into a palava. It all may seem simple compared to what we find in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania unless they have shaken off their old Soviet era ways.