Plans, plans and more plans

This blog is going to cover our trip to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (thanks to a reader for pointing out the correct appellation) in 2010.  Before getting to the plans let us deconstruct that country name:

• Britain: OK, although the Britons as a genetic identity probably died out a couple of millenia ago.
• Great: once, certainly.  Now is more dubious.
• Kingdom: Why isn't it a Queendom?
• United: The place contains England (OK that wants to stay); Northern Ireland (about half the population wants to stay, even though they have got a separate mention); Wales (got their own Parliament and see N Ireland); Scotland (see Wales); Isle of Man (happy to stay as long as they don't pay taxes) and the Channel Islands (last time I checked they are two States and they are only in it for Foreign Affairs and a cheap army - see Isle of man  but the Channellers probably would rather be French).

The big picture of planning was that the trip was to involve touring Gothic Cathedrals and birding sites.  The driver of the process was the cathedrals, following the success of a tour of this nature around L'Ile de France in about 1997.  There are pages about those attributes elsewhere as linked.  This left us three things to book:

1. Flights;
2. Accommodation; and
3. Rental Car.

There seemed to be no real difficulty with flights so I thought the first thing to do was the accommodation in the UK.
Accomodation
This was made relatively easy by Frances finding the Enjoy England website.  Indeed the only problem with the site was sorting out the plethora of places they had on offer.  We ended up selecting three places as looking rather good:

• Ingleby Manor (North Yorkshire);  
• The Coach House (Norfolk) and 
• Beanacre Barn (Somerset).  

Is it not astonishing that each of these places is not only part of an internet based travel booking system but has its own website.  If only the banking system was as good!

We changed our mind a couple of times about the order to visit them, with that shown being the 1st selection and the final one after the Barn couldn't take us for the second week.  I wondered about doing the West Country first but it turned out the Glastonbury Festival was on that week which seemed to make it likely that part of the UK is going to be full of punks and junkies.  Thus we ended up as shown.

All three property owners seemed most excellent in terms of being very responsive and helpful to us (and it might be noted from the end of the trip they continued those traits even after meeting me).  Getting the three places organised took us about a five days elapsed time with Martin putting in perhaps 2 hours contact time.

The only issue was generated by the banks.  It appears that to send money to an account in Europe it is necessary to use an International Bank Account Number (IBAN).  This seems to identify the bank, the branch and the account.  Thus get rid of all the other crap about names etc.  Not for WESTPAC. (I have put in the link in the hope that all readers of this page send that company some email advice!)

Having seen the array of stuff they seemed to require for an on-line transfer (most of which I didn't have, and the one bit I did have contradicted info on the Westpac site) I decided to go for a serviced transfer. That got kiboshed because the teller needed the address of the Bank in England.  So I sent an email to the owners seeking this info.

Then I got an email from another property which looked as though it should work - even though the IBAN contradicted the WESTPAC advice - because it told me they were dealing with the Royal Bank of Scotland.  On doing this online it emerged that all that was really needed was enough detail to identify which of an array of bank names were to be used.  It seems that WESTPAC deal with Royal Bank of Scotland under a range of situations and they all have different SWIFT codes.  The only one that looked sensible referred to transfers so I picked that and it generated a SWIFT code.  There was no need to know the address at all.

So, back to situation 1.  The problem was that the info from the owners didn't include the name of the bank.  The appearance of the letters MIDL suggested 'Midland Bank' but that was taken over by HSBC some years ago.  So I googled GB69MIDL and up popped 4 webpages.  One of them, the membership page for the European Museum indicated the Bank name was none other than HSBC.  So I included that and again got a list of possible bank names: most of these looked fronts for the Corleone Family or the source of letters advising me that I had won a squillion dollars in a lottery I had never entered; however buried in the middle of it was "HSBC all British Branches" which looked to fit the bill.

What a palaver for something so simple.  The offending mob of idiots got a nice email pointing out the problems with the system.

A linguistic aside: in the old days 'bank-robber' referred to someone who robbed banks.  These days it is probably used as much to identify the banks as a subset of robbers!

AIRFARES

In early research I had found that Emirates was back being a cheap airline and one of those that flew directly into Manchester (a key driver of this process being to avoid Heathrow).  I very quickly found flights that matched our requirements and set about booking the flgihts.

Suddenly I found myself back at the WESTPACsite filling in something from Mastercard Secure "to ensure my security".  Having mentioned the s-word you can probably see that this is not going to be happy.  Sure enough the screen clears and I am told to contact my Emirates Office.  GRRRRRR!

So I ring Emirates and it turns out that the problem was that I hadn't registered with Mastercard Secure before starting the process.  Never having heard of this service before it was hardly surprising I hadn't registered with them.  The good thing about this was that the young lady taking the booking requested nice seats etc for us. 

Back to westpac, on the phone, with a whole lotta short, Anglo Saxon, words in my mind.  Their starting point was that only some companies use the Mastercard secure 'service' so it isn't really part of their system.  (ie it is Emirates fault.)  To get me registered, to prevent a recurrence of this lunacy, we search the WESTPAC site for Verified by VISA!!  I pointed out to the young lady - a different one, but also nice - that I used a Mastercard she said "Yes, but if you search for that you won't get to the right place."  The short, Anglo Saxon words got almost past my teeth!  After 17 minutes we had finished the exercise: as I commented to the young lady, I hope someone was recording the call so that they realised how appalling the system is.

Car rental

We decided this didn't have to be done for a while, so it wasn't.

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).