Other things needed

As well as the big ticket items there were other things we needed to do:

• Join a birding organisation
• Join the National Trust of Australia
• Get a road Atlas
• Get the Good Beer Guide!!! 
• Sort out mobile phone coverage;
• Sort out crrency arrangements

Each of these will be covered below.

Join a birding organisation.

My initial thought was the British Trust for Ornithology: I can't remember why I thought this, but on contacting a British birder of very good repute he rapidly advised to join the RSPB instead.  It was obvious from their website that the cost of membership would be way less than the Reserve entry fees (and car parking fees) that we would otherwise incur.  Duly signed up.

They have sent us a nice little welcome package including a book of their top Reserves.   They enter the list of good guys.

Join the National Trust of Australia

 Frances found out some time ago that they have reciprocal rights with the UK NT but charge about 1/4 the annual fee an this should get us, gratis, into all sorts of stately piles in the UK.  If, of course, we should come across stately piles we wish to enter!

Unfortunately the ACT Branch of the NTA seem to have learnt their marketing strategy from some dodgy Merchant Bank.  In addition to the advertised $95 subscription - roughly double that of the RSPB - they were going to slug us a $35 joining fee.  This makes it no more expensive to join the UK NT! 

Get a Road Atlas

The deal seems to be publications of the Automobile Association.  For reasons I cannot comprehend it is about half price to get them through Amazon than the AA.  Whatever, done.  The book has duly arrived and looks rather good.  It even has the village I grew up in (Mayland) shown and n the right place - in the past the village was either not shown at all (the usual situation or positioned) at the primary school about 2km from the main cluster of huts.

Get the Good Beer Guide

To anyone that reckons this should be a big ticket item I will only say "I know where you are coming from" but then add that I hope the UK has advanced as has the USA where good beer is available everywhere in large and interesting amounts.  (It is always good to hope.)  To assuage the tender sensibilities of beer fanciers I will ask you to note that I have created a Pommie Beer page in this blog.  It will be rather empty until we get there since British beer is damn expensive in Australia.

At first glance it appears that the Good Beer guide is like the AA Road Atlas: it seems to be cheaper to buy through Amazon than from CAMRA!  Which is nuts.  On second glance I have actually ordered the 2009 edition which cost Stg 1p (plus Stg7 postage) through Amazon rather than the 2010 edition through CAMRA (Stg15 plus Stg7 postage).  As I said, this is nuts!

On studying the tome  the reason for cheapness appears to be that it is a used copy!  I came to this conclusion on noticing a few pencil comments against a couple of items.  This then explained why several hundred brews had been highlighted.  I counted 89  highlighted brews from the breweries beginning with 'W' (assuming this is a more less representative sample that means well over 2,000 marked in total). My conseqent questions are if the previous owner tried all of these,

1. how come the book was in such good order?and 
2. was the owners liver in equally good shape?

Mobile phone coverage

Both Frances and I have VIRGIN mobile phones which offer roaming in the UK.  However, they also seem to offer a subsidy (approximately covering the entire cost of the project) to Richard Branson's space shuttle program in the charges to each call.  The sensible way to go seemed to be to buy a pommie SIM card as soon as we can.  The other alternative - relying on UK Telecom phone boxes - is obviously ridiculous, both from our expectations of:

• the likely charges; and 
• the probability of finding one that works anywhere that we are likely to be going.  

One of these is high and the other low: guess which is what.

This topic appeared to advance a bit when Frances got an email from the Visit Britain folks spruiking a Global SIM card for which you paid Stg43 and got Stg25 of airtime.  Unfortunately they didn't give any info about the call charges other than an assertion that their charges were "up to 75% less than standard mobile charges".   This is sort of like "Trust us, we're from a Telecom company!". I suspect that

• this company learnt their trade flogging "genuine Swizs watches" off a barrow in the Strand; and
• was founded by C M O T Dibbler from the Discworld.

We will see how the plot develops when (or if) I find out what their charges are.

Surprisingly I have not got  a response from Visit UK so I explored the vendors website.  It is full of that which you find after a herd of bovines have passed through a paddock, which does of course confirm the views expressed in the previous paragraph.  Their rates for calls within the UK are 37P per minute, whereas Virgin UK are 20P per minute!  The only problem is to find a VIRGIN store - to my astonishment they don't have one in Manchester airport!

In fact Virgin shops turned out to be very hard to find.  However on our first day of touristing I spotted a Vodaphone shop in York and as their rates were similar to Virgin I acquired a SIM card from them.  The next issue was that my phone was still locked to Virgin Australia, but fortunately there are many shops in the UK that specialise in unlocking mobile phones! 

Currency arrangements

We have in the past shown great skill in stuffing up conversions between currencies, in that we have moved money from one to another in such a way that we got the worst rate in both directions.  However at the time of writing this the Australian dollar was doing rather well against Sterling so we thought we'd get some £ Sterling while it was cheap. 

Obviously we didn't want to schlep around large amounts of folding stuff - we may pass close to Bradford (for example).  From reading the consumer information - I should probably get an award for slogging through the 50 pages of PDF this involved - about our Mastercards it appeared that Westpac also had a space shuttle subsidisation program with each transaction attracting charges like a candle in rain forest attracts bugs (not forgetting the arbitrage which is never going to be in our favour).  However our financial adviser mentioned an ANZ Travel card as a good thing.  Indeed it did so appear on reading another 50 pages of PDF: other than the fact that ANZ get to have our money, earning interest for them while we aren't spending it, the charges are quite minimal (although there is a nasty little 1.1% of each reload, so we worked out what we thought we might spent and put it all in the initial transaction).